Journal of Sonic Studies
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About this portal
The portal is used to publish contributions for the online OA Journal of Sonic Studies, the storage of A/V materials, and the storage of previous issues.
contact person(s):
Marcel Cobussen ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
,
Vincent Meelberg ![](/rc/images/email.gif)
url:
http://sonicstudies.org/about
Recent Activities
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EDITORIAL: Listenings
(2018)
author(s): Marcel Cobussen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In 2005 Dutch musicologist, composer, and writer Elmer Schönberger gave the Huizinga lecture entitled ‘Het Grote Luisteren – reikhalzen naar muziek’ [The Large Listening – yearning for music].[1] It is a passionate plea for a disinterested, disengaged listening to ‘real’ music, music as an autonomous art form, and explicitly opposed to popular music with its connection to ‘easy’ or consumptive listening. With great enthusiasm, Schönberger joins the heritage of Eduard Hanslick and his ‘tönend bewegte Formen’ [tonally moving forms] and Peter Kivy’s ‘music alone’. He condescendingly refers to the late 18th century, the only period in Western history in which the utmost refinement and the greatest music-technical complexity had merged with the popular virtues of street songs: the Mozart operas and Haydn symphonies.
Schönberger’s Large Listening is a structural listening to high art that has, obviously, disconnected itself from socio-historical circumstances. Large Listening is not only a return to the basic material of music, to the tones themselves, but also requires understanding of the structural, architectural, and expressive richness of this ‘music alone’. Large Listening is listening to Webern, Stravinsky, Bach, Purcell, and Bruckner instead of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (all examples are taken from Schönberger’s lecture).
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Editorial: Materials of Sound
(2018)
author(s): Caleb Kelly
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Editorial: Materials of Sound
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Not at Home: The Uncanny Experiences of Radio Home Run
(2018)
author(s): Heather Contant
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this paper, I attempt to better understand the Japanese media artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of radioart by examining the relationship of this concept to movement. To do this, I focus on the Japanese term ika, which can be used to describe the uncanny feeling that results from aesthetic strategies, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s artistic techniques of defamiliarization or Bertolt Brecht’s alienating tactics of Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt). Discussions of ika not only circulated through and around the intellectual and artistic communities that Kogawa participated in during the 1970s and 1980s, they also influenced the practices of the very low-powered FM radio stations, Radio Polybucket and Radio Home Run, established by Kogawa’s students in the early 1980s. By discussing the emphasis of ika and physical movement in Radio Polybucket’s and Radio Home Run’s practices, I begin to trace a central element in Kogawa’s concept of radioart, which I call a kinetic interaction with the material conditions of radio. Through this kinetic interaction, Kogawa makes the material aspects of radio phenomena—its technology, its electromagnetic waves, and its sonic content—perceptible in a new way and thereby reveals previously hidden possibilities.
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Bodies and Energy, Circuits and Sound: Rethinking and Listening to Leon Ernest Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit with a Bio-synthesizer
(2018)
author(s): Pia van Gelder
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Leon Ernest Eeman’s Cooperative Healing: The Curative Properties of Human Radiations (1947) documents decades of the author’s experiments with bio-circuits, beginning in 1919. Detailing the many configurations and uses of Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit, the book proposes that these circuits promote muscular relaxation, counter fatigue and disease, and stimulate activity by harnessing and circulating radiant energy from within the body. Using only electrical conductors and copper wire, the circuit connected subjects to themselves, redirecting energies internally, or in parallel with a number of subjects, sharing energy collectively. Eeman’s work explores the body as a kind of battery, working with configurations based on polarities—from head to toe and left to right. Although writing on Eeman is scarce, recent literature examining historical conceptions of energy and the body, including the work of Carolyn Thomas De La Peña, stress the importance of examining similar practices of energetic healing using bioelectricity as they inform our present relationships with technology, medicine, energy and the body.
This paper will introduce Eeman’s work and discuss my artistic reenactment of the Relaxation Circuit as a participatory installation. This work, also entitled Relaxation Circuit, was presented in 2015 at Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney. The work recreated Eeman’s circuit for five participants with the addition of a bio-synthesizer, which included five oscillators modulated by the conductivity of each participant’s skin. In this reworking, participants were asked to lie in the circuit and listen to the amplified sounds of their collective bodies. This paper examines people’s experiences with bioelectricity in the work, both embodied and sonified.
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Len Lye’s Kinetic Experiments: Sounds of Sculpture
(2018)
author(s): Sarah Wall
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
When New Zealand artist Len Lye branched out into kinetic sculpture in 1958, his conceptualization was intimately connected to music. In the same way that some dance can enhance the music that accompanies it, Lye proposed that his kinetic sculpture was also naturally suited to this function as, like dance, its foundation is movement (Lye 1958: 7). Witnessing Lye’s steel sculptures in motion is a highly corporeal experience, with the sounds produced by their movements a key element in their sensory impact and appeal. To further strengthen the affective qualities of his sculpture, over a span of ten years Lye carried out numerous experiments incorporating various techniques and technology from both music and film, culminating in the idea to record and make these new sounds available to musicians and composers as source material for their compositions (Smythe 2006: 2). Focusing on a number of key events and a set of audio recordings held in the Len Lye Foundation Archive, this paper considers how, through such experiments, Lye was able to situate his motion composition outside the visual arts and within the field of music composition, to be viewed as “musical instruments rather than visual kinetic works of art” (Lye n.d.-a:8). When considered in relation to Lye’s achievements as a filmmaker and a sculptor, the audio recordings are easily dismissed as an interesting but isolated experiment. Driven by extensive primary research material, my aim here is to revisit and reappraise Lye’s experiments with sound, placing them within a critical framework informed by consideration of his working across the disciplines of experimental film, sculpture, and music.
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Materials of Sound: Sound As (More Than) Sound
(2018)
author(s): Caleb Kelly
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
By examining the materials that produce sound within contemporary art, we can approach sounding works not only from the perspective of “sound as sound” or “sound in itself” but rather as “sound as more than sound.” Sound can never be without a history, culture, or political situation, and by approaching sounding practices in the same manner as we critically approach contemporary art practices, we allow matter to matter.