Group items tagged

"Walking in nature has long been associated with creativity. Yet walking's associated research and artistic practices remain dogged by representationalism. Concomitantly, intersectional concerns of race, gender, and dis/ability determine what kinds of bodies are allowed to walk where (and in this case, the where is Brexit-era Britain). This article attempts to navigate the complexity of these tensions, contextualizing a five-day walking research-creation project along St. Cuthbert's Way that we called Queer Sonic Cultures. As academics and artists interested in the relationship between walking and composition, our initial propositions are to become affected as we walked and to create sonic cultures (songs) using whatever affected us along the way. In using research-creation as a research methodology, we understand our artistic compositional practice of co-creating lyrics-melody-harmony-production-arrangement as the research. Unlike some forms of arts-based research that use an artistic form to disseminate research findings, in research-creation the artistic practice is the research and the theory. In the interests of continuing to make this apparent, we shall prefer to describe this contextualizing article as Academic Liner Notes. The Academic Liner Notes begin with a brief description of the location of the walk, contextualized within the tradition of walking and composing in the British landscape, and the use of sound-based methods and literature to represent such landscapes. In this section we will trouble the whiteness and cis-hetero heritage of walking and art in rural Britain. Following this, we will introduce research-creation as a methodology contextualized within affect studies. We argue that the resultant sonic cultures (nine in total) rather than representing the walk, in fact, more-than-representationally intensify the affective dimensions of the relations we were part of along the way."

"Cooking sounds resonate between the interest they draw in contemporary culture and the neglect in which we have been under-hearing them for many years. It is addressed by Tara Brabazon, a researcher in Cultural Studies, in her article The Sounds of Food: Defamiliarization and the Blinding of Taste.[1] She indicates that in food literature, the attention given to sound is reduced and approaches the acoustics of food as an "oral history" of the obsolete, unheard, undocumented geographies created around food, questioning the cultural hegemony of the visual, the tactile, and the gustatory. Anna Harris is an anthropologist studying topics related with well-being and nutrition who wrote the article The Hollow Knock and Other Sounds in Recipes,[2] where she examines how sound has been used to communicate and instruct the preparation of a group of food recipes including bread loafs. "

"That color and smell have a sensory connection is long-established, but there's debate about whether associating the smell of strawberries with red or smoke with black is something structured in our brains, based in language, or resulting from experience. A study published this week in the peer-reviewed, open-access PLoS One called "Cross-Cultural Color-Odor Associations" suggests it may be cultural."

"Two recent films about Deaf culture have been lauded by hearing audiences, but set deafness and music at odds in superficial ways."

"This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples - sound art, environmental recordings, music - will be provided and invited throughout the term."

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative group of individuals from Iraq and the United States. Together, we've created this online platform for mixing and sharing of recorded sounds and stories across cultures. Our goal is to connect citizens from nations in conflict in an open dialogue based around the sharing of field recordings, songs, and interviews. Hopefully, this might help to collapse the barriers of physical space that contribute to the misunderstandings between cultures and to emphasize the subversive value of sharing experiences across political borders.

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future's reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories.

"What role does ambient music have in society and in musical culture? A new book explores how the genre has developed over the last 40 years"

In Resonance: The Journal of Sound and culture "This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI's automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. "

"Radio can be a familiar friend, source of knowledge, a marker of time and place. But as a cultural institution, what constitutes a "good voice" in radio reflects and transmits cultural norms and structures. When I started my Community Storytelling Radio Fellowship at Making Contact, I prepared by reading articles from Transom and AIR media about interviewing, storytelling, and production. I felt more intimidated as I read about advice on 'how to do radio,' especially since some parts were very physical (e.g., holding a microphone close to a person for a significant length of time). I wondered, "Where do disabled people like me fit in the radio community? Why don't articles about diversity in radio ever mention people with disabilities?" Al Letson's 2015 Transom manifesto explores the the default straight white male voice. It resonated with me immediately and I'd also add that the "default human being" on radio is able-bodied as well."

"Emily Thompson, historian at Princeton University and the author of Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, talks about her study of sound and her website featuring sounds of New York City in the 1920's."

"As in sacred music in the West, Tibetan music has complex systems of musical notation and a long history of written religious song. "A vital component of Tibetan Buddhist experience," explains Google Arts & Cultures Buddhist Digital Resource Center, "musical notation allows for the transference of sacred sound and ceremony across generations. A means to memorize sacred text, express devotion, ward off feral spirts, and invoke deities.""

"Setting out to explore the sonic environment of a city is a daunting task. Seeking to discover how and where meaning is attributed, in relationship to the acoustic environment, is a different beast all together. The aim is not to provide a definitive answer to these questions but to set out in a dialogue that employs landscape and acoustic ecologies with an anthropological perspective of culture, place and sound."

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.

"Libraries, as 'sanctuaries of quiet', are unique places, both culturally and acoustically: they soundproof our thoughts from the distraction and the noise outside their walls. However, they also coerce us into behaving quietly, amplifying the sounds we make beneath their domed acoustic chambers. Manchester Central Library's main reading room, placed on the top floor and filled with natural light, was designed to impose a state of quiet on the reader, with every small sound amplified by the unique acoustic of the domed roof."

"My foreign-born parents who have lived in the United States for over 40 years both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in "accent elimination," I worked with my parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to "neutralize" my parents' accents and then teach each of them to me. The very existence of these courses points to the complexities of assimilation and self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other. In the video, my parents and I struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access. The accent is treated very literally, like an heirloom, and the project illustrates the very awkward attempt to concretely transfer this elusive, and ultimately culturally determined, attribute."

"Elevator Pitch is inspired by Kim's childhood memories of crowding elevators with her Deaf friends, and shouting so loudly that they could feel the vibrations of each others' voices. Meanwhile, elevators are often known to hearing people as sites of "awkward silence," thus the concept of this installation challenges when and where various people have a voice. Born Deaf herself, Kim approaches Elevator Pitch by investigating how Deaf communities of New Orleans experience a city so deeply defined by music, and by highlighting how Deaf people are vital to this culture of sound. "

"krewe coumbite is an archive and remix process conducted by muthi reed. reed gathers and assembles media through sharing, relationship, deconstruction, making, sampling and mixing. Central to their process is the observance of Black sound, rituals and feelings. krewe coumbite is a study in dynamic being-ness (finesse, shape, free form and movement, ontology, ritual, vernacular) that is Blackness. Borrowing from the Black love strategies cultivated by maroons, rastas, social aid and pleasure clubs, mutual aid societies, movement organizers, the Black Arts Movement, Harlem Renaissance, urban rebels/rebellions of the 1960s, Jamaican Sound System, freestyle and hip hop culture of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, krewe coumbite engages local presence and the non conditions of space through occupying publics, interior time, light and sound projections, convergence and soul culture."

On the seventieth anniversary of the first performance of Cage's 4'33", this issue of Australian Humanities Review features a collection of essays by authors from a range of humanities disciplines who have been willing to adventurously think about, theorise or creatively experiment with the legacy of Cage's work, which, whether praised, censured or misunderstood, has had an undeniable influence on the music and performance that came after it. In the time since its first performance, the aesthetic, cultural and conceptual reach of Cage's 4'33" has been immense. Cage's experimental oeuvre (music, writings, teaching) is internationally significant, having been exported from America to the world, including Australia. The special section includes short essays by Shayne Bowden, Rachel Campbell and James Hazel Maher, Kim Cunio, Dieter Daniels, Richard Elliott, Daniel Fishkin, Mack Hagood, Peter Jaeger, Douglas Kahn, Caleb Kelly, Sally Macarthur, Julian Murphet, David Toop, Shelley Trower and Stephen Whittington.

Art cannot be created or destroyed - only remixed. In a convincing talk from TEDGlobal 2012, director Kirby Ferguson highlights that remixing, referencing and reproducing previous innovations allows artists to engage in a cultural dialogue and allows art, technology and society to continue evolving.