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"Watching people, talking with them, and actively engaging in social practices are the participatory techniques through which the ethnographer learns to see the world as his or her participants do, rich with socially constructed and historically situated meaning. Yet the focus on seeing the world as your participants do sometimes eclipses the other sensory modes that people employ to make sense of social and material interactions."

"Jennie C. Jones  practice mines the territory of Modernism-abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts-to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century's social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. "

"As more than a third of the planet's human population has gone into some sort of social restriction…self-isolation, social isolation, physical distancing, quarantine…since those who have the luxury of walls have gone behind them-time has not so much stood still, but became fragmented and blurred. Our schedule markers have gone virtual, or gone away, or are far away.  As artists of various media attempt to capture some essence of this time, it may be found that fragments, notes, moments, and blurs, are what express better our experience. Text, audio, visual-both moving and still, compilations, complications, towards combobulations, if that is what comes. This is a time-capsule archive of finished works, and of fragments, reflecting a fragmented time. Fragments that feel frozen or appropriate as they are, and would then be placed with other fragments to create an unanticipated whole."

"Instead of dealing with the aesthetic aspects of the acoustic environment, the evolution of listening habits or cultural representations of urban noise, sound will be considered as a means for action and social practice. This paper tries to develop a praxiological approach to sound. To do so, two major obstacles must be overcome. On the one hand, it is necessary to challenge the three main socially recognized categories of sounds: music, speech and noise. "

"In this dual performance-lecture, "In Search of Queer Sound," Tcherepnin proposed that sound, and the process of listening, exists beyond pure materiality: listening as a social process, one that is not only natural, but also cultural. He suggested that much like linguistic comprehension, our perception of sound is socially coded. "

"The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people's perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020."

"In order to design a computer game soundscape that allows a game player to feel immersed in theirvirtual world, we must understand how we navigate and understand the real world soundscape. In thischapter I will explore how sound, particularly in urban spaces, is increasingly categorised as noise,ignoring both the social signicance of any soundscape and how we use sound to interpret and negotiate space. I will explore innovative methodologies for identifying an individual's perception of soundscapes. Designing virtual soundscapes without prior investigation into their cultural and social meaning could prove problematic."

"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."

" Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include Nomadic Listening (2024) a series of workshops and radio installation for Manifesta15 with communities in the Barcelona Metropolitan region, and o-o-radio! (2022), a project at Wysing Arts Centre constructing homemade radios with d/Deaf young people, to better understand how hearing aids operate."

"Experiences of listening may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the intensities of worldly contact and each other. Reflecting upon particular modes of listening, from the empathic to the migratory, understandings of sharing and togetherness will be drawn out, leading to a consideration of what we might call an acoustics of interruption. Accordingly, listening is posed as a framework through which formations of social solidarity and self-organization may be generated, where material and immaterial, real and imaginary forces are equally demanded."

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."

"Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global, urban capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them-rattus norvegicus burrows through the supposed human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography. We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the (20khz) threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech. "

"My background is in sound design where I freelanced as a sound effects recordist and editor, location recordist and sound designer on commercials, feature films and documentaries. I also give workshops in sound design and interactive programming. I am founder of Social Sound Design, a Q&A site for sound designers. Please come and visit, we have a superb community."

"Sound is ubiquitous and permanent, and embraces us as an envelope. Therefore, the experience of the auditory can be considered an environmental experience par excellence. The term and concept of soundscape reflects this idea. It implies, that sounds do not exist in isolation, and have to be understood as being embedded in and interacting with other sounds and perceptions coining the perceptional abilities of individuals and societies and their social relations: soundscape is a system in which all elements are interdependent."

"Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organising. Through the performance of a militant sound investigation, the audio collective map contested spaces and histories as an articulation of social relations. Drawing on the formal strategies of early Conceptualism, We Come from Your Future facilitates a particular kind of discursive action whose performance of announcing and denouncing constitute an intervention. We Come from Your Future is comprised of two episodes in which Ultra-red ask, "What are the sounds of anti-racism?" Posing this question in the context of anti-racist and migrant organizing in the UK, the first episode features a set of dispatches that combine audio compositions with accompanying field reports. These online dispatches lead up to and inform an on-site event as part of the Triennial Prologues: Altermodern at Tate Britain on June 28. "

"Some questions we aim to address are; How can we analyze and address the increasingly homogenized sounds of urban environments from traffic and other forms of urban "noise"? How can we creatively respond to the effect of urban noise on the loss of character or identity of a place? What are desirable sound environments? How can we establish new codes or behaviors that help shape our sound environments? How can we adapt or modify existing the architectural to develop new acoustic spaces? How can we identify unique or characteristic social patterns that help shape the sonic identity of a place? What role does technology play in this process, specifically newly available and more affordable digital recording technologies? "

The project set out to give a rich and rigorous account of human perception of and response to soundscapes. To do this it used overlapping methods from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the quantitative (e.g. acoustics) to the qualitative (e.g. social science) to the creative (e.g. sound art). Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) determined that people conceptualised a soundscape into three components: sound sources (e.g. a market), sound descriptors (e.g. rumbling) and soundscape descriptors (e.g. hubbub). Lab-based listening tests along with the fieldwork have revealed that two key dimensions of the emotional response to a soundscape are calmness and vibrancy. In the lab these factors explain nearly 80% of the variance in listener response. Interview responses from real soundscapes further indicate that vibrancy can be expressed in two sub-dimensions expressing variation over time and over sound mix. Physiological validation of the main dimensions is provided by images of changes in the brain during listening from fMRI scans and by changes in heart rate. Artistic work and the public responses to it illustrate the huge range of sounds and soundscapes considered positive. Tools for simulating soundscapes have been developed and seem to be effective for several purposes, including design and public engagement - that is, sound play. The project results will lead to new metrics and assessment methods for soundscapes, new ideas for design and user engagement and, perhaps, better policy on environmental noise.

The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations that share a common concern with the state of the world's soundscapes. Our members represent a multi-disciplinary spectrum of individuals engaged in the study of the social, cultural and ecological aspects of the sonic environment. Within this framework of care for the sonic environment WFAE works in collaboration with it's Affiliated and Associated Organizations to promote:

"David Hendy, media historian at the University of Sussex, host of the thirty-part BBC Radio series, Noise: A Human History, and the author of Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, talks about the social history of noise and kicks off the call-in on the question of sound and creativity. What sounds sparks your creativity or do you need absolute quiet?"

This site documents my work as a mixed-media artist. I've worked primarily with sound and video since the early 1990s and performed and worked on projects throughout Europe and North America. In recent years I have also concentrated on giving workshops on various aspects of sound that encourage collaboration through social communication, performance, mapping, recording and editing. - ohn grzinich