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We are pleased to announce the launch of SoundEffects, a new international peer-reviewed journal on sound and sound experience operating on the Open Journal System. SoundEffects brings together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience. The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, psychology and sociology. In order to push the boundary of interdisciplinary sound studies into new areas, we also encourage contributions from disciplines such as health care, architecture, and sound design. As the only international journal to take a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound, SoundEffects is responding to the increasing global interest in sound studies.

"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."

Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer based in London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. The book engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. It seeks to immerse the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, to establish an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and to promote the notion of a sonic sensibility. Other recent writings include an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011 issue, and an essay on durational radio for Kunstradio ORF Austria. Her blog soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday.

Circuit-bending is an electronic art which implements creative audio short-circuiting. This renegade path of electrons represents a catalytic force capable of exploding new experimental musical forms forward at a velocity previously unknown. Anyone at all can do it; no prior knowledge of electronics is needed. The technique is, without a doubt, the easiest electronic audio design process in existence.

"Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an internationally celebrated artist who works with sound and an internationally recognized expert forensic listener. He likes to call himself a Private Ear. Your host visits Lawrence in Beirut to hear more."

Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western cultures. We record, analyze and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations. The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.