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webinar on psychoacoustics - video with sound samples

Sophie Landres (Stony Brook University) leads a discussion with artist A.K. Burns on the topic of queer sound, featuring a sonic contribution from artist Jules Gimbrone. Psychoacoustics Session I was presented by AVANT.org at the ALLGOLD MoMA PS1 Print Shop on May 30, 2015.

"Sarah Hennies's highly personal explorations of "queer and trans identity, love, intimacy and psychoacoustics" are increasingly played by others."

"Psycho-Acoustics: Sound Control, Emotional Control, and Sonic Warfare" explores the work of former Stevens professor Harold Burris-Meyer whose research in the mid-twentieth century investigated the use of sound as a tool for emotional and physiological control and played a critical role in the emerging fields of sound design for theater, music for industry, and applied psychoacoustics for warfare."

Positive soundscapes project In the acoustics community, sound in the environment - especially that made by other people - has overwhelmingly been considered in negative terms, as both intrusive and undesirable. The strong focus of traditional engineering acoustics on reducing noise level ignores the many possibilities for characterising positive aspects of the soundscapes around us. Desirable aspects of the soundscape have been investigated in the past, mainly by artists and social scientists. This work has had little impact on quantitative engineering acoustics, however, perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines."

"For Alexiou, the immersive listening debate is easily put to rest. "Humans can hear down to roughly 20Hz. If you look at the frequency response of many headphones and some speakers, they often rate their range somewhere close to that. The reality, however, is, you can rarely have the power and privacy to be able to drive them appropriately. In the case of headphones, sound is only hitting your ears, not your body, something any sound system enthusiast knows the limitations of all too well. It's the feeling that matters.""

"There is a long line of theories claiming that we have reached the end of art, but they are forgetting something, writes Joanna Demers"

"   "Blissful positive energy," "Full chakra healing," "Extremely powerful third eye opening" - such are the benefits of binaural beat listening as promised in the titles of a few popular YouTube videos.[1] Throughout the wide distribution network of binaural beat audio, discourses abound that purport effects such as heightened sexual arousal; improved performance at job interviews; psychedelic-like drug experiences; enhancements in creativity, IQ, and lucid dreaming; and assistance in the fight against cancer. More than a panacea, binaural beats and the meditative auditory experience the associated rhetoric claims they provide, do not just heal or prevent defect and injury; they heighten the overall quality of life. Or, so is the promise.  "

"Sound plays an influential part in how we view the world. It gives us social cues and evokes certain emotions, such as a dog barking might instill fear or a baby laughing can cause happiness. "

"The noise sounds like wind, or heavy rain, or the steady hum of an airline jet. It sounds like water rushing somewhere in the distance, like a gentle fan ruffling currents of cool air. It's soothing, steady, slightly rumbly. Welcome to the cult of BROWN NOISE, a sometimes hazily-defined category of neutral, dense sound that contains every frequency our ears can detect. Brown noise is like white noise but has a lower, deeper quality. It gained a fervent following over the summer, picking up speed in online A.D.H.D. communities, where people made videos of their reactions to hearing it for the first time. Many said it allowed their brains to feel calm, freed from an internal monologue. Some invited their viewers to try it too, and commenters chimed in, claiming that brown noise was not only a tool to help them focus, but could relieve stress and soothe them to sleep."

"Maryanne Amacher, Lamonte Young's Dream House, and the transformative power of the endless drone."

"Pushing off from experiences in which music hails its listener in terms of communal belonging, this essay tries to productively shift our attention towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent and a solvent of the political experience of antagonism encountered when identification claims us (or fails to claim to us). Sound- not music but the raw immanence of sounds we cannot identify- can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound might help us echo-locate the edges of subjection, and encounter its ontological outside."

"Percussion is also a discipline that is overwhelmingly considered to be "for boys." I recently began asking myself why I chose drums as a nine-year-old, when I showed an aptitude for just about any kind of instrument. I had wanted to play piano when I was five, but was never given lessons. Why drums, then ? Why not still piano four years later ? Even as I write this, I have some regret that I never became a pianist."

QUEER TRASH SYMPOSIUM was an auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.

Writings on Maryanne Amacher