openwork

(our) geological murmur

2021-10-04T13:31:09+00:00

A poem by Molly Anderson Fiero.

Sonic Legal Spaces

2021-08-16T17:56:51+00:00

This essay explores the contestation and liberatory potential of various sounding and listening practices within the metropolitan area of Chicago, especially in relation to the city as a racialized legal space of segregation, gentrification, and private property. While considering listening in terms of the individual or community is important, we should also consider how the state listens and what disciplinary effects such listening enacts vis-á-vis legal definitions of noise. What counts as sound or noise, far from abstract fact, is determined by social dispositions of taste materialized into cultural preferences that are further concretized into municipal ordinances. While this essay attends to the sonic legal space of the city as regulatory, it also examines the role sound plays in setting up the potential for radical encounters and speculative relationalities. As such, it outlines a form of sonic mutuality that refuses to gloss over the challenges of living in a noisy city while also refusing the state’s authority to transform social disputes into criminal matters. Sonic mutualism requires new orientations to the problem of overlapping sonic desires within the complexities of urban life. How might we understand our sonic dispositions and tastes apart from the territorial logics of capital, property, and control? What might it look like to form extralegal social arrangements that mediate conflicting audio desires beyond criminalization? To ask these types of questions is to challenge the reduction of the city to an abstract zone of commerciality, and instead hear the city as a sonic commons.

Echoic Re-Presencing

2022-03-10T01:04:58+00:00

This paper considers listening as a method in media archaeology—a cluster of technology-oriented approaches to the past that attend to “dead end” inventions outside teleological narratives of progress. In particular, Wolfgang Ernst’s media-archaeological ear advances a materialist approach which favors listening to “the technical signifier rather than […] the acoustic or musical signified.” However, this perspective is subject to recurrent critiques from feminist scholars who highlight the lack of regard for the asymmetrical power structures that undergird technical objects and their exclusion from historical narratives. As a case study, and interrogation of the possibilities for a feminist media archaeology, this paper examines the work of Daphne Oram, a British composer whose contributions to electronic music have been routinely overlooked, and the excavation of her work in Oramics: Atlantis Anew (2011), a film by Aura Satz. The archival vestiges of Oram’s composition technique, in which visual notations on celluloid are sonified by her Oramics Machine, align with, and demand consideration beyond, Ernst’s “ascetic approach to signals.” Through a close reading of Satz’s film, I suggest that her simultaneous attention to the material processes of sound technologies and the erasure of women’s labor posits a necessary extension to this mode of enquiry. Considering recent feminist interventions in media archaeology, as well as critiques in sound studies that drawn on feminist STS to challenge the presumed universality of listening, this paper proposes a framework of media-archaeological listening as echoic re-presencing. Oram’s work, and Satz’s re-prescencing of it, therefore open up possibilities for listening otherwise to the sonic past.

Multimodal Listening as Technologically-Mediated Embodied Musicking

2021-09-16T01:30:00+00:00

This paper discusses an approach to multimodal listening that draws upon three disparate but related areas of research: the creative music practice of the first author, quantitative evaluation of vibrotactile technology within speech and hearing science aimed at improving music perception and enjoyment for cochlear implant users, and a qualitative study involving the musical experiences of people who routinely wear a variety of assistive hearing technologies. It proposes that listening is an active, embodied process, taking place within the diverse sensorimotor, sociocultural, and aesthetic relationships between listeners and their worlds. These ideas are explored through observations of musical listening experiences that are technologically-mediated in various ways: they are ones which incorporate both the sonic and the tactile, but which do not aim to simply substitute one sensory modality for another. This project is intentionally interdisciplinary in its methodologies with the goal of illuminating how research approaches that work in tension can be productively inventive.

Borborygmus Auscultation of Stomachless Ecologies

2021-08-16T12:33:18+00:00

HDGC, or Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer, is a rare form of stomach cancer caused by a mutation of the CDH1 gene. Screening protocols suggest upper endoscopy biopsies every three to six months, however, since HDGC is nearly impossible to detect in early stages, the recommended preventative measure is total gastrectomy (TG) surgery—a complete removal of the stomach. Modified lifestyles for stomachless persons include many changes, but some of the most quotidian aspects surround the novel anatomy of the intestines and their lively gastrointestinal conversations. One patient describes their own intestinal dialogue as “so loud and so rumbly that you could hear it across the room.” Another claims how their “gut has made lots of noise, but these noises [post-surgery] are new, and REALLY loud .” For these patients and others, sound and listening become key characteristics and significant aspects of a stomachless body.

This lyric essay explores how audible bodily expressions can, on the one hand, manifest feelings of uncertainty, fear, self-loathing, and physical alienation; and, on the other hand, serve as forms of empowerment, healing, and physical remediation. Moreover, this piece is a meditation on environmental thinking, and questions the delineations between objects of listening (sonic phenomena as material objects) and listening-subjects. Here, borborygmus auscultation foregrounds the broader ecologies (from microbiomes to conservation field sites) in which listeners are enmeshed.

Listening in/for Ekbatan

2021-10-21T17:06:16+00:00

This article develops through dialogues between a poet, English teacher, and musician based in Ekbatan, Iran, and a sound artist and anthropologist based in Wakefield, England. These dialogues center on a listening in/for the town of Shahrak-e Ekbatan, Tehran, Iran and aim to situate it according to its material structure and sonic ecology. In June, 2021, the authors listened to and recorded Ekbatan every day for about an hour around sunset. This text provides (auto-) ethnographic reflections on the soundscape of Ekbatan via original field recordings and interviews, and through discussions of shared memories from an autobiographical perspective. By analyzing first-hand accounts and recordings, the authors also meditate on noticeable changes within the soundscape and discuss their social-political and economic underpinnings. Ekbatan is a planned town, located near the western borders of the Iranian capital Tehran. For the authors—current and former residents of Ekbatan—it represents a prototypical utopic neighborhood; its cold and robust façades offer warm interiorities; its spatial organization creates liminal spaces that manifest disalienation, community, and collective identity.

Scaling Refrains

2021-08-15T17:29:26+00:00

Within and beyond the 1950s environmental framework, the global awareness toward the anthropogenic environmental impact and risk has stimulated critical discussions of the interrelations of human, nature, and material productive forces with an expansion of the planetary scale interrelations and place imaginaries as multiplicities. Parallel to the global transformation of risk societies, Turkiye has been dealing with environmental risks that transform its ecologies in acoustical and political senses. However, the historical and recently manifested discourses about sound and soundscapes have remained contingencies of the national singular narratives. By attending to the rhizomatic multiplicities in soundscapes along with the changing environmental definitions of sense of place, in this article, I examine refrains and investigate the fundamental question of why a particular acoustic ecology is recognized in singular forms and monophonies that are representative of this place imaginary independent of the forces in a material sense. Via the new terms that I coin, origin-essence and impetus, I further analyze refrains’ role in constructing communal imaginaries centered around inter- and intra-nationality to present the ongoing modern silences, narratives of Islamic and secular binary divisions, and the monophony of soundscapes of Turkiye. In doing so, I examine post-Covid-19 mosque recitations and broadcasts in Ankara in relation to the mosque calls’ role in preventing the July 15^th, 2016 military coup d’etat attempt, the historical dichotomy of makam and scale in relation to European colonialism and Turkish cosmopolitanism, and the significance of refrains in Béla Bartók’s and Adnan Saygun’s ethnomusicological research in Central Anatolia.

Inclusive Listening

2021-12-13T15:40:39+00:00

Our essay presents a critique of the limitations of Western Classical Music (WCM) in Aural Studies curricula, and the problems this poses for students from diverse musicking backgrounds. We propose a new teaching and learning framework, inspired by Black Feminist Pedagogy and aimed towards inclusivity, that devotes prolonged attention to multiple kinds of listening and analysis practices outside the WCM tradition. Our framework will be a live, open-access resource for teachers and self-directed students to understand various methods of listening and analysis. We prioritize the ability of this framework to communicate to students from a variety of disciplines and musicking backgrounds, including those who wish to develop listening skills relevant to electronic music practices, sound art, scored music, improvised music, and traditional musics. We believe that Aural Studies should be a teaching and learning space where a radical, prolonged breaking-down of institutional hierarchies can be enacted and propose that Aural Studies practices hold the potential to escape the notation-centeredness of WCM and the power dynamics implicit in that orientation.

Education and Embodiment

2022-04-25T22:24:31+00:00

This audio-visual piece examines the sonic repetition and intersection of exhibits, tour programming, and environmental ambience within Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia. Through field recordings, sample-based looping, voice-over, and animation, the artist draws on her experience working as a museum educator to question her relationship to - and participation in - the sound culture of the historic space.

calliope listens amongst her selves

2021-08-18T16:52:02+00:00

Video (12:01) with edited output of a study whereby recordings taken from 3 propagated instances of the Monstera deliciosa plant, Calliope, were fed into a 3trinsRGB video synthesizer. The original recordings are layered to accompany the video, which in all is a speculative document of a network organism's practice of listening to itself.

Urgent Listening

2021-08-14T21:41:25+00:00

This conversation, which took place in Oxford, England, is part of a series of conversations hosted by Gascia Ouzounian on the theme “Countersonics: Radical Sonic Imaginaries.” It has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Closed Circuits

2023-04-23T11:25:37+00:00

Landline, Lifeline is a sculpture by Kamari Carter in which four telephones play cauterised halves of 911 emergency call conversations. The listener hears the callers and despatchers separately, together or in new configurations, implicating themselves in the process.

Carter is an artist living in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. He speaks here to his colleague Julian Day about the piece and the ideas that drive his practice: critical eavesdropping, hidden systems and racialised discrepancies of power.

Included here is a video of the original installation alongside an interactive web version of the work and the conversation between Carter and Day as both edited text and audio.

To Whom / What / When / Why / Which Do We Listen?

2023-05-16T11:54:06+00:00