Introduction

Abstract

As we close the third volume of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, we say goodbye to Dr. Phylis Johnson in her role as co-editor. Some years back, she and I worked closely together to conceive of a new sound studies journal that endeavored to sustain a space of relevancy, emergence, and opportunity. I am proud to say that Resonance is that journal, and I am grateful to Phylis for her broad-mindedness as a skilled collaborator and for her talent, wit, and wisdom as an experienced researcher. We wish her well as she continues her research in sound and media, her leadership in higher education, and her creative pursuits in poetry and more!– Jay NeedhamThis issue of Resonance features the original research of several scholars. In “Henri Chopin: From the Paper Civilization to the Electronic Age,” librarian and art historian Jack Patterson invites us to expand our understanding and appreciation of orality and art through Chopin’s contributions as a postwar artist who, in addition to his work as editor, publisher, and designer of the influential magazines Cinquième Saison and Revue OU, was also an artist whose practice and theories relating to Poésie sonore were influenced by both Antonin Artaud and the emerging media theories of Marshall McLuhan. Patterson’s detailed research focuses on five of Chopin’s audio-poèmes: Pêche de nuit (1958–66), Sol Air (1964), Le Corps (1966), La Civilization du papier (1974–75), and La Peur (1958–69). When theorized together, these works help describe Chopin’s path that propelled him toward a bodily art that revived and extended pre-linguistic orality when combined with the use of emerging recording technologies such as the reel-to-reel tape machine. Patterson writes:Insofar as he used media technology as tool, an idea of poetic authorship never fully disappeared from Chopin’s work. His origins as poet enabled him to maintain that his work was more poetic than musical. Chopin excluded his work from musique concrète, despite its similarity with the work of Schaeffer, and noted that poésie sonore should even take “precedence” over that of electroacoustic composers.While this may be understood as an amusingly petty claim, it points toward Chopin’s artistic worldview. He wrote that “in fact, poetry is the basis of all expression, and with electronic sound we have rediscovered this.” Like his colleague Arthur Pétronio, a friend of Wassily Kandinsky—both theorists of sound who’d been inspired by folkloric tradition—Chopin was motivated by poiesis as expression, and believed that all expression began with the body.Patterson’s research is a welcome addition to the scholarship connecting postwar artists and their influences. He unites Chopin’s innovative explorations of the voice, a reading of the artist’s unprocessed trauma, and Chopin’s specific use of technologies to reengage readers with poésie sonore as a highly individual and political art of the body and its memory. Of poésie sonore, Chopin wrote that it was: “downright individual, just like the voice itself. Because, without our own voices, we do not exist.”Continuing the thread of research into the artistic extensions of the human voice practiced in the arts after World War II is interdisciplinary artist and scholar Paul Beaudoin’s contribution, “At the Border of Poetry and Music.” Beaudoin’s analysis of “Ciel Inamputable,” a text-sound work by Fylkingen language art group member Ilmar Laaban. The research centers on a detailed analysis of Laaban’s composition through the technique of spectral analysis. For Beaudoin, spectral analysis offers an opportunity to make deeper connections to this improvised work when combined with elements of Robert Cogan’s Table of Oppositions. Beaudoin describes his process:As a way of understanding the work’s formal strategies, spectral analysis can significantly help. The spectral analysis gives us a glimpse of the unique sonic characteristics of the “instrument”—a voice is as unique as a fingerprint. Spectral analysis can expand our listening capacity and help parse sectional divisions, sonic connections, and various timbral interweaving. As Cogan notes, “A theory of tone color is necessarily (at least in part) a theory of musical structure.”Beaudoin’s narrative reading and descriptive breakdowns of the phrases, ranges, and energies depicted with spectral analysis offer a newly satisfying and less technical way of appreciating how spectral information is presented.Laaban, the conservatory-trained composer, appears just at the end of the work in an excellent example of text painting. Nearing the end of Division 4, there is a cacophony of phonetics. In this climactic moment, the entire registral space is activated. Metaphorically, it is as if you have entered a room filled with party-going guests waiting for an announcement by the host. When the host appears, the crowd falls silent (another use of opposition), and the host announces the invitation to sit at the table.Author Miniature Malekpour’s contribution, “The Cultural Dialogue of Fidelity and Rendering in the Music of Googoosh in Hamsafar” (1975), is a welcome reading of the “film-Farsi” era of film production in pre-revolutionary Iran. For this case study, Malekpour’s focus is the Iranian pop singer and actress Faegheh Atashin, known as Googoosh, who, while shaped by the influences of westoxification and modern cinema, communicates a specific level of aural urgency in Masoud Asadolla’s film Hamsafar. In describing the effects of a patriarchal structure under Islamic doctorine, Malekpour notes:The politics of the patriarchal structure stem from the issue of the Iranian woman’s modernity and the expansion of the political juncture that a female artist may attempt to question (or disregard) in practice. The word art itself has been subjected to the vast discriminatory objectification of the female desire, or “anti-glamorization” of the female under the Islamic doctrine.Additionally, the author provides a number of compelling schemas for interpreting the expressions of feminist functions within the soundtrack:It is important to differentiate the scope of fidelity, diagetic sound, and the notion of rendering when it comes to expressing the feminist function of the soundtrack of Hamsafar. As rendering occurs on a barely recognizable conscious level, the figurative nature of voices, music, and sound can be categorized as simply variety of aural illusions.As we continue our soundwork series, we present “Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation,” in which doctoral student Hilarie Ashton investigates the sixties girl group the Chiffons and how they were controlled within a white-male dominated industry, which often misinterpreted their original message; the group ostensibly opted for a more docile and marketable form of song that reinforced traditional female stereotypes within a framework of white conservative masculinity. The author also outlines how the Chiffons were transgressive and powerful, a group of talented artists who worked toward a change in the power relations of popular music:In these acts of sung desire and reclaimed melody, the Chiffons shift the sonic effect back toward the singer and her desires, and away from production, songwriting, management, and other white male–dominated roles. In their songs, they mark different kinds of transgressively voiced spaces (some representative, some liberatory, some deservedly more self-serving) that work toward different forms of creative liberation. And they ventriloquize the tricky, deep, lusty feelings of teenage girlhood, feelings that most girls’ families, social structures, and the cultures around them avoided or papered over. In so doing, they contribute to a legacy of Black women’s liberatory sonic work that clears paths for modern artists, from En Vogue to Beyoncé, to follow or to diverge from.Ashton’s research on the Chiffons asks important questions about our shared musical/cultural experiences, adding to our collective knowledge about race and gender stereotypes that were strongly present in the 1960s. While referencing George Harrison’s theft of the melody of the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” for use in his post-Beatles song, “My Sweet Lord,” Ashton frames the Chiffons’ career:Where cultural memory is concerned, the Chiffons’ career is positioned in an uneven place: infamously marked by the appropriation of their work by one of the most famous men in music history as well as containing an almost forgotten convergence with a historic tragedy, a contrast that raises crucial questions about the caprices and constructions of cultural memory and artistic quotation. Such a pernicious gap, its conceptual ground broken and maintained by misogyny, racism, and their particular anti-Black intersection within misogynoir, raises questions of what the terms (and the limits) are by which we as a culture determine what to remember and what to forget.“A Postcolonial MIR?” is Emily Hansell Clark’s critical examination of the science of music information retrieval (MIR). In this piece, Hansell Clark investigates paths that can create an interdisciplinary collaboration between technology and music:By unpacking the differences in critical or postcolonial versus computational approaches to music studies, it becomes possible to bring these fields productively together in interdisciplinary conversations and to potentially match critical questions, or “problems,” with appropriate technological tools, or “solutions.”By using artificial intelligence technologies in partnership with recent approaches in ethnomusicological analysis, the author hopes to identify new patterns and relevant data that might bring new meaning to the research that is pursued in music archives:Musical meaning must take into account complex and changing contexts that go beyond the reaches of computational technologies. Moreover, the question of meaning is an open problem for exploration and problematization, not a question to be answered with a concrete solution, which makes it different from the types of problems that often drive studies in a field like information science.This issue’s commentary features an essay by the award-winning ethnographer and communications researcher Christina Dunbar-Hester. In “Save the (White) Whales: Whalesong, the Cetacean Sensorium, and Exceptional Brains,” Dunbar-Hester calls on the “soundwork of cetacean communicability in environmental activism” to help ascertain how whales obtained their exceptional status as ambassadors for conservation in the early 1970s:Midcentury military cetologists were motivated to probe the cetacean sensorium for a project of imperial dominance. Though cetaceans were drawn into human exceptionalism as a result of this scientific inquiry, attaining this status has not had the effect of unambiguously saving them from annihilation, as many of them are still imperiled (by ship strikes, ocean warming, and acoustic harm, if not by whaling).Composed from a compellingly commingled array of diverse sources, Dunbar-Hester calls for critical reconsiderations of equivalence, and how the study of contemporary conservation models, racial biopolitics, and media studies might help to reframe how both whale and whalesong are understood in a multisensory world.Also in this issue, artist Honna Veerkamp has contributed an exhibition review of Botanical Resonance: Plants and Sounds in the Garden, curated by Nezka Pfeifer at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis Missouri. The exhibition features a 12-channel sound installation titled Welcome Home Habitat by Missouri artist Kevin Harris; “Reverberations,” a textile installation considering plant communication by Brooke Erin Goldstein; and Annika Kappner’s Liquid Landscapes, a pairing of 4′× 8′ digital prints that are accompanied by two soundwalks by Kappner and composer Eric Maltz. Botanical Resonance: Plants and Sounds in the Garden is on exhibit through March 2023.***We would like to thank the authors and reviewers and are proud to share their valued research here in this fourth issue of our third volume. We would also like to thank our associate editors, Anna Friz, Carter Mathes, and Josh Shepperd, for their wisdom and dedication. Additionally, we want to thank the following people for their support, hard work, and guidance in the development of this journal: David Famiano, Cheryl Owen, Laura Kenney, and Janet Vail. Our continued thanks go out to the members of our talented editorial board for their acumen and insights.Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture is an interdisciplinary, international peer-reviewed journal that features research and writing of scholars and artists working in fields typically considered to be the domain of sound art and sound studies. These fields may include traditional and new forms of radio, music, performance, installation, sound technologies, immersive realities, and studies-based disciplines such as musicology, philosophy, and cultural studies. The scope extends to other disciplines such as ethnography, cultural geography, ecologies, media archaeology, digital humanities, audiology, communications, and architecture. This journal’s purview investigates the research, theory, and praxis of sound from diverse cultural perspectives in the arts and sciences and encourages consideration of ethnicity, race, and gender within theoretical and/or artistic frameworks as they relate to sound. Resonance also welcomes research and approaches that explore cultural boundaries and expand upon the concept of sound as a living, cultural force whose territories and impacts are still emerging.