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The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. This exhibition responds to his practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Centred around an audio play and a video installation, A Slightly Curving Place brings together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists, and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform each other's work. Elements from Umashankar's biography serve as a compass amid the material in vitrines, as a dancing body positions the endlessness of time in relation to a series of ruptures that is history. Under a dome of speakers an assembly of listeners gathers to sense a past they cannot hear. The sound that arrives is only a record of sound as it might have been.

"What does it mean to listen to the past? An exhibition curated by Nida Ghouse"

"Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure-a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now."

OPEN ACCESS FORTHCOMING AUTHORS ABOUT CONTACT A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.

"In 2006, the authors initiated the Landscape & Perception (L&P) project under the aegis of the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. The project is a pilot study of raw visual and acoustic elements mainly on and around the Carn Menyn ridge, Mynydd Preseli, south-west Wales, the source area of some of the Stonehenge bluestones, an area still relatively untouched by modern development. Sites in the surrounding Pembrokeshire countryside were also briefly visited. The project asked: "What might Stone Age eyes and ears have perceived in this landscape, and what aspects made it become important to the builders of Stonehenge?" The L&P project was primarily conceived to encourage a younger generation of audio-visual practitioners to use direct, natural sensory source material for their digital work, to offset the increasing overuse of disembodied digital sources. In the course of the fieldwork, it was felt that observations had been made that could perhaps be archaeologically relevant in a landscape that until very recently has been subjected to surprisingly little archaeological study. In July 2013, the fieldwork part of the project extended to acoustic tests of the bluestones in situ at Stonehenge. This paper is a preliminary report concerning selected, potential archaeology relevant aspects of the project's fieldwork to date."

"Without acoustics, archaeology is deaf. Without archaeology, acoustics is blind. - David Lubman"

"A prehistoric necropolis yields clues to the ancient use of sound and its effect on human brain activity. Researchers detected the presence of a strong double resonance frequency at 70Hz and 114Hz inside a 5,000-years-old mortuary temple on the Mediterranean island of Malta. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is an underground complex created in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period as a depository for bones and a shrine for ritual use. A chamber known as "The Oracle Room" has a fabled reputation for exceptional sound behavior."

"Stonehenge was the ultimate venue for ceremonies and rituals when it was built more than 4000 years ago. But what did they sound like? Now a 1:12 scale model of the site, with the stones in their original positions, reveals the surprising acoustic qualities of the monument."

"The world of acoustics is not just confined to finely tuned auditoriums and recording studios. The most intriguing sonic experiences can be had in some of the world's unique buildings and structures. "

"This paper traces the relationship between art and atrocity, materiality and decay, and the aural possibilities of hospitality in a time of terror. There is one site in particular that seems to speak so poignantly to the complex workings of trauma, ruin, and memory, and it is the use of sound in this place that I wish to draw attention to here. The September 11 Memorial and Museum may not appear, at first, to signal the ways in which sound might usher in a new way of thinking about the philosophically complex concept of hospitality nor the promises of decay. Yet, one installation in particular manages to do just that. Located in the Museum's Historical Exhibition, and evocative of death, mourning, and haunting, William Basinski's sound and video installation, The Disintegration Loops, offers a fitting yet unique elegy to the loss of the towers and nearly 3,000 innocent people."