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"On Tuesday evening Sergei Tcherepnin performed a new composition at Issue Project Room in Downtown Brooklyn, where he is currently an artist in residence. You probably expect me to tell you something about this performance, but I'm afraid it's not that simple. "

"To read Susan Sontag's 2003 essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, with pencil scribbling references to current-day wars is to be expected. Hers is a profound rethinking of the intersection of news, art and contemporary depictions of violence and our memories of them. So, too, could the word "Ferguson" be readily jotted in the margins. Meandering the intersections helps us navigate memory well beyond any of the recent conflagrations between Black citizens and militarized police forces in U.S. cities. "

Described as an electro-acoustic sound installation, Shawn Decker's Prairie recalls the sights and sounds of its namesake via a field of speakers and thin, swaying metal rods. Thin, tall brass rods glisten in the light as individual motors, with small speakers mounted to the top, cause them to vibrate and sway. Each brass stem operates independently, and the entire installation--including hundreds of these rods--is programmed to operate in randomized patterns of sound and movement. "It is much more fun as a creator to compose a piece that is continuously surprising you," Decker noted. "I will often laugh out loud when it does something I don't expect. The element of change and indeterminacy allows you to become a much more active listener." Prairie is more than a soundscape. It is an environment that will entrance both eye and ear. The concepts presented in the installation--nature and technology, sound and movement, sculpture and performance--come together to enchant the viewer and invite a reconsideration of the elements that make the prairie unique.

"Organ of Corti is an experimental instrument that recycles noise from the environment. It does not make any sound of its own, but rather it attempts to draw our attention to the sounds already present by framing them in a new way. Named after the organ of hearing in the inner ear, it uses the acoustic technology of sonic crystals to accentuate and attenuate frequencies within the broad range of sound present in road traffic or falling water. By recycling surplus sounds from our environment, we hope to challenge expectations of what might constitute a piece of music by adding nothing to the existing soundscape but rather offering new ways of listening to what is already there. This instrument is a device that, for us, rematerializes our experience of sound, inviting us to "listen to ourselves listen"."

"In this paper, I interpret the musical performativity of Jamie Stewart, frontman for experimental pop/rock band Xiu Xiu, in terms of abjection. In contradistinction to analyses that represent abjection primarily as a psychic property or pathology, I read abjection as a state of social exclusion or rejection perpetuated by socialized individuals. Stewart's provocative vocal performances in Xiu Xiu dramatize the conditions upon which these exclusions are formed and enforced, illustrating the connection between abjection and the normative aesthetic expectations by which we assess the moral status of others."

The sound of silence. The title of a 1964 Simon & Garfunkel song seemed appropriate Thursday as ESPN televised the opening round of the first fall Masters golf tournament.

"This talk will consider the notion of sonic possible worlds in relation to the body. I will discuss the body as material and fleshly body, as human and more than human form, whose sonic possibilities ruptures norms and expectations through invisible permutations, silences and screams. Thus, I will sound and articulate a body in trans-formation, ephemeral and porous; questioning of individuation and the boundary of the skin. And hope to hear the unrecognizable body, at the margins of the representational frame and at the brink of viability, to engage in how its sonic possibility challenges who we count as real, and how we hear their actuality: the norms and naturalizations that give us the recognizable body and its name."

"During our recent Points of Listening public event held at the De La Warr Pavilion we conducted participatory experiments in care-ful listening. Through the workshop process we created collaborative manifestos, guidelines, protocols and imaginations of listening that help us to tune in and take care, to hear the inaudible and that which does not fit within expectations of language and recognisable sounds."