Aural Art Research Articles

Educating Ears: The Role of Sound in Music Learning

School curricula in the United States tend to focus on students’ visual sense, making the teaching and learning of aural art a unique and challenging endeavor. In this philosophical inquiry with practical applications, I propose that the music curriculum be reevaluated with an ear toward the quality of sounds students hear daily as a foundation for heightened aural attention. Perhaps some music classes could more aptly be conceived as sound exploration classes, making school music opportunities accessible to more students and likely inspiring lifelong engagement with aural art. Music teachers will tend to offer a “sound” approach in their classrooms only to the extent that they themselves have had ample opportunities to explore their own aural interface with the world.

The Application of Video Technology in Dance Courses

Photography and audiovisual products are used in many ways as a technological means of recording coherent things. The art of dance as both visual and aural art is a good match for the nature of photographic technology. This has led to the use of photography in dance training and dance documentation as a means of giving visual feedback to dancers. However, due to the reproducibility and high distribution of photography, there are still many challenges regarding copyright and user choice of photography. This article explores the challenges and applications of photographic technology in the art of dance from a variety of perspectives. It also discusses the development of photographic technology as a means of promoting the discipline of dance at a time when virtual teaching is widely used in all disciplines. Using the example of the covid-19 online dance course, it explores the advantages and disadvantages of its use in practice.

Language Heightened

Poets and calligraphers are united in their appreciation for the beauty of words. Yet whereas many poets compose according to principles of sound, the calligrapher is guided above all by the sense of sight. This essay seeks to elucidate the hermeneutical dynamics at play in contemporary calligraphic renderings of poetic texts composed for oral recitation, using the work and interpretive legacy of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as a test-case. After briefly introducing my theme, I turn to consider Hopkins’s theory and practice of aural composition, drawing on specific poems to illuminate his mastery of acoustic depth. I go on to examine three transcriptions of his work by three contemporary calligraphic artists, focusing on key interpretive choices each scribe makes when translating Hopkins’s aural art into a visual form. At each stage of my investigation, I demonstrate how both the poet and his interpreters invite recipients of their artwork to a deeper appreciation for the wonder of language in ordinary circumstances.

Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

Three evidence explicating the visual dimensions of music

Music is an aural art because it uses organized sound as the medium for the several roles that it plays in society including but not limited to validation of social institutions, reinforcing culture, as culture, for catharsis, socialisation, education, therapeutic and communication, among others. Through the ages, the perception of music as an exclusive aural art has been perpetuated in literature that it appears invisible. However, it is not only at the sonic level that it functions. Data from this study came from observation of musical performances and audience behaviour in several contexts and study of the definitions of music in extant literature. When observed closely, one finds that it has a visual element as attested to by response to aesthetic appreciation of musical performances, linguistic expressions, and preferential response of market forces for audio-visual recordings than audio recordings. These examples question the long held perception that music is entirely a sonic art whereas it is not so. It is therefore imperative to re-examine and redefine music as an art that is not just aural but with an audio-visual component.Keywords: Aural, Audio-visual Art, Music, Sonic Art, Visual Art

Tonal Poetry, Bop Aesthetics, and Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard

In the following article, I will attempt to outline a new reading methodology for Beat fiction, based on some of the principles of bop aesthetics. This reading understands fiction—especially Beat fiction—as an aural art, as opposed to merely a textual phenomenon (and so considers fiction in much the same way that poetry and music are often considered). Jack Kerouac composed his novel Visions of Gerard in 1956 (released in 1963), the same year Charles Mingus released his classic album Pithecanthropus Erectus. I contend that by reading Kerouac’s novel in terms of Mingus’s methods of composition as recorded on that album, we can more clearly hear the influence of jazz music on Kerouac’s prose; as such, we can better understand the means by which jazz music became important as a compositional method and not just as a theme for Kerouac’s novels. Further, becoming more attuned to the means by which Kerouac composed his fiction as an aural soundscape—how he was sensitive not just to the words themselves but to the sounds that comprise those words and their relationships—we can better appreciate the various ways that Kerouac imbued his novels with aural qualities that emphasized the ideas and emotions raised and/or engaged by the narratives.

Composing the Context: Considerations on materially mediated electronic musicianship

A range of material objects can be transformed into sound emitters by the induction of audio-rate vibration with structure-borne sound drivers. The resulting acoustically activated physical objects offer the possibility to extend the compositional gesture towards the material environment, providing a literal re-reading of Schaeffer’s objet sonore concept. Engaging sound in physical objects ties the creative gesture to its surroundings, grounding the approach in an inherently situated dimension. This article examines the compositional strategies emerging from diffusing sound via physical objects, such as sound spatialisation, audiovisual sculpture and audiotactility in concert setting, illustrated by four case studies of recent aural artwork. On the basis of the case studies, the aesthetic implications of materially mediated aural art are discussed, in relation with the ideal of purity represented by the high-fidelity loudspeaker. While the technological development of the loudspeaker aims for a perfect reproduction of an idealised and autonomous sound, materially mediated sound diffusion merges sound and matter into an agglomerate where the sound can no longer be perceived as an autonomous entity, but rather in relation to its material source. Engaging electronic musicianship in materiality gives rise to a hybrid setting at the interface of the digital, the material and the human, where the context – the environment of sound-emitting objects – becomes an object of composition.

From Stage to Screen: Early Filmmaking of Indigenous Performers in Highland Central Java

This paper is based on an empirical study that explores issues around the process of a traditional performance art group in a village in highland Central Java adapting to film production. Wayang orang—or loosely translated human puppet—is a traditional opera-like performance rooted in Central and East Java, Indonesia. As part of a traditional society living in a rural area, members of the group discuss their productions mostly without written documents. Storylines were experienced through performing and watching different shows. Technical skills were built through lifelong intimate practices. The project explores a general explorative question: how does a traditional oral and aural art group adapt to electronic apparatuses of cinema and create their films? In answering this question, the research uses ethnography or participant observation followed by filmmaking collaborations that involve these artists, the writer and different filmmakers from the industry. The writer positions himself as the producer for the films, supporting and managing the members of the group to explore their own artistic decisions. This paper focuses on one particular production at the early stage of the project.

Automated Notation of Piano Recordings for Historic Performance Practice Study

We describe a system that automatically notates a comparative visualization of multiple recorded performances of the same musical work. Written musical scores have transmitted basic performance information to musicians over the ages; however, these scores only provide skeletal instructions that must be fleshed out in performance, as musical notation describes phrasing, articulation, dynamics, accentuation, and other ornamentations in generalized and ambiguous forms. Consequently, musical performances derived from the same notation can vary widely from each other in the same manner that a written text may be spoken with intense emotion or in flat monotone. Prior to the advent of recording technology, musical performances were ephemeral, only occurring once, never to be heard again in exactly the same rendition. As a result, musical interpretations were informed only by live listening. Now, with more than a century of recorded performance practice, musicians can delve deeper into the history of their aural art to gain inspiration and insight from sources that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Performers have become interested in giving performances inspired by recordings of the past, which often obey a musical common sense alien to the standards of modern practice, and it is useful for historically informed performers to describe, analyze, emulate, and internalize the performance styles of the past through the detailed study of recordings. Although much can be learned by listening, a visual interface may reveal potentially inaudible details of a recording. Because performers interact daily with traditional musical notation—a sophisticated, if ambiguous, multidimensional visualization of musical information—one approach to the design of such an interface leverages performers' existing knowledge by reducing the gap between data visualization and traditional musical notation as much as possible. Using Abjad, a Python-based tool for musical composition, the symbols of conventional staff notation are augmented to illustrate the intensity and temporal proximity of performed musical events graphically, thus facilitating the comparison of individual performances and the study of changes in performance aesthetics over time.

Book Review: The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English

Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to Magic and Mystery of Practical English. Roy Peter Clark. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. 294 pp. $19.99 hbk.It doesn't matter what topic is-chickens or global economics or yoga: people who are passionate and knowledgeable about their subject make for a good story. Add good writing and a sense of whimsy to that passion, and you almost can't miss.With fifteen books on writing and editing behind him, Roy Peter Clark's passion for writing is well known. For those who don't know him personally, however, title of this book should hint at whimsy. There really aren't many people who can make a 294-page discussion of fun, mysterious, and magical, but Poynter Institute's longtime oracle of all things wordish does it by reminding us of power and magic of language.Putting glamour back into is Clark's goal. Wordsmiths already know joy of language (as Clark discusses in his first chapter, reading dictionaries is fun), but not everyone may recognize etymological connection between grammar and glamour.Was there ever in popular imagination a word less glamourous than grammar? Clark asks, turning to Oxford English Dictionary for explanation: The bridge between glamour and is he finds. According to OED, glamour evolved from through an ancient association between learning and enchantment. Once, was not just about language and, eventually, writing, he says, but all forms of learning, including magic, alchemy, astrology, even witchcraft.Good enough. It's not about rules, then. Let's consider incantation to invoke magic of language, and see that punctuation, syntax, usage, spacing, pacing, and rest all are ingredients to make magic work.The central ingredients, of course, are words, but Clark urges writers not to bog down in rigid convention. Sure, spelling counts because comprehension matters, but learn seven ways to invent words to make use of their music, he suggests; crossdress parts of speech, and spend some time in a thesaurus-a word from Greek that means 'treasury.'Clark's passion for his craftalso turns even smallest elements of language into powerful alchemy-he spends a fifty-page chapter on Points, traffic signals of sentences that Clark calls the ligaments of meaning and purpose. man can wax poetic-and convincingly-about periods! full stop is a rhythmic device in language and in writing, after all, reminding us that writing is language, after all-an aural art that must be heard like music in order to be understood and appreciated. Short sentences, Clark suggests. Slow reader. Build suspense. Magnify emotion.Of many disconnects between too-often estranged wordsters in English classrooms and journalistic newsrooms, perhaps none is as focused as use of comma. Leave aside dependent clauses and wasteful strings of modifiers (the road to hell is paved with adverbs)-what about a comma before and? …

Stress Weight: Unwilled Order, Clothes Lines & Crowned Teeth

There are many ways of describing rhythm in poetry, all of them to some extent artificial and none of them giving the absolutely true picture of what is happening. What follows is another such; it is one poet's way of hearing how language interacts in the tradition and the dialect out of which that poet works. At best, it describes a different way of hearing the rhythm; at worst it is the nearest this poet can get to describing how he hears language interact. In the paper that follows I intend to present and explain the interaction of words across the poetic line in a number of examples chosen from the work of poets with a Hiberno-English or Irish Language background and attempt to find reasons for those interactions in terms of their linguistic heritage. The paper will discuss how the line functions within this system as both the basic musical unit and the base unit of sense in a poem, exploring how tensions between the two can be exploited. Starting from two basic premises: that poetry is an aural art; and that part of the idea behind the art form is to reflect and imitate in an artful way the natural modulations of speech, the paper investigates one way of describing metrics which avoids rendering metre in a mechanical fashion but recognises the complexity of the living breathing language.

So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic (review)

Reviewed by: So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic Christopher E. Mehrens So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic. By Alan Rich. Milwaukee, WI: Amadeus, 2006. [xxix, 338 p. ISBN 1574671332. $24.95.] As a student of American music criticism, I was very pleased when the great West Coast critic Alan Rich's latest book found its way to my desk. So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic is an extraordinary collection of Rich's critical writing ("outcries") over the past twenty-five years and covers a broad range of subjects including his observations on music of the past and the present. For those unfamiliar with his writing style, the following amuse-gueule from his preface offers a taste of his truly distinctive approach to the literary art and addresses his decision to uproot himself from what many consider to be the music epicenter of the United States, New York, to move to the West Coast. Almost all of these assorted outcries date from what the history guys would refer to as my "third" or "late" or "sunset" period when—at an age when most people would have learned to know better if they ever will—I chucked a perfectly respectable New York existence, made my way west ostensibly for one year, and then lost my return ticket. For reasons that make no sense to me, or to anyone at all close to me, I have found life in California —even the musical life—extraordinarily congenial. I don't surf; I'm not even sure I remember how to dog-paddle. I don't "make the scene" (or whatever the current expression might be). I do own a Jacuzzi, because it's good for my arthritis, and I do pick oranges in my backyard—but from a neighbor's tree.... For all or none of the above reasons, I love writing in California. (p. xv) Rich excels in his profession for he possesses a facility which is daunting to all except the best writers on music—that of being able to translate into words commentary on what is essentially an aural art form. This difficulty was well explained to me years ago by the American composer Roger Hannay (1930–2006), who remarked that the only valid analysis of a musical composition was another composition. Years later, he expanded on this idea in an unpublished article of 1985, "The Creative Arts and the Composer," which found its way into his self-published book, My Book of Life: A Collection of Autobiographical Essays (rev. ed. Chapel Hill, NC, [1998]): When writing about their work, authors have the happy advantage of doing so in [End Page 881] their own medium. Not so composers and painters who, assuming the unfamiliar and treacherous medium of the written word, enter into the society of letters, tiptoeing about, eager for acceptance, unsure of the welcome, and at some point certain to trip over the carpet, smashing the antique glass.... Of course, the best way for composers, painters, or sculptors to comment on their work is to compose more music, and paint more paintings, or mold more sculptures. (p. 597) The disadvantage of the critic has always been a matter of having the proper language in which to address their subject, and this was recognized over eighty years ago by Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi in his book, The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1923): The chief difficulty with which the critic has to contend is the inadequacy and looseness of the vocabulary at his disposal, for the purposes of describing as well as of judging. It is generally impossible to describe music in words. At times the specific technical description is possible (especially of single points), but comparatively seldom. And even when it is, its critical import will remain limited. The effects produced by music may be described impressively, but not always with sufficient accuracy to constitute a contribution to criticism. (pp. 126–27) From very early on, Rich was consciously aware of the evasiveness of an effective language for musical description as evinced from the following passage in his early volume, Careers & Opportunities in...

Music and the Aural Arts

The visual arts include painting, sculpture, photography, video and film. But many people would argue that music is the universal or only art of sound. In the modernist era, Western art music has incorporated unpitched sounds or noise, and I pursue the question of whether this process allows space for non-musical soundart. Are there non-musical arts of sound – is there an art phonography, for instance, to parallel art photography? At the same time, I attempt characterisation of music, contrasting acoustic, aesthetic and acousmatic accounts. My view is that there is some truth in all of these. I defend the claim that music is an art with small a – practice involving skill or craft whose ends are essentially aesthetic, that especially rewards aesthetic attention – whose material is sounds exhibiting tonal organisation. But acoustic and acousmatic accounts help to distinguish between music and non-musical soundart, since music must have preponderance of tones for its material.

A Conversation with Yusef Komunyakaa

Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa brings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes his work alternately as word paintings and as and his affinity with the visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output. His collaborations with artists in a variety of genres, including music, dance, drama, opera, and painting have produced groundbreaking performance pieces. Throughout the collection, Komunyakaa's interest in finding and creating poetry across the artistic spectrum is made manifest. For his collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989, Komunyakaa became the first African American male to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Through his work he provides keen insight into life's mysteries from seemingly inconsequential and insignificant life forms (Ode to the Maggot) to some of the most compelling historical and life-altering events of our time, such as the Vietnam War (Facing It). Influenced strongly by jazz, blues, and folklore, as well as the classical poetic tradition, his poetry comprises a riveting chronicle of the African American experience.

Systems for nonlinear instruments and notation

Abstract Linear notation when applied to sculptural, or nonlinear instruments is mutually obstructive. Take for example a sound sculpture which has been designed to link the visual and aural arts in a balanced representation — how does one score for an instrument where the pitched elements may only be a by‐product of visual and timbral or even logistical considerations; where sound parameters do not operate along a convenient continuum; where resonators are not presented in panel format for easy access; where traditional percussion mallets may be wholly unsuitable? The symbiotic nature of nonlinear instruments is the stuff of compromise as the spatial position of resonant objects, relative to human limitations, impose a set of physically possible or convenient musical gestures. These considerations extend beyond the limits of traditional notation and bring to the fore the question as to whether new systems should be devised or whether, perhaps, it is best for such performances to remain within an improvis...

Dance as an Expression of Islamic Culture

What, if anything, relates the dances of the Muslim peoples to the other arts produced by the culture to which they belong? Is there a community of belief and an aesthetic identity strong enough among the Muslim peoples, despite their wide geographic dispersion, that would result in a homo-geneous community of artistic production and appreciation? Is dance among the Muslims an art which, like the visual and aural arts, shares characteristics which reveal a consistency and unity despite regional differences? Or, on the contrary, is “Islamic” only a convenient label for an amorphous body of dance phenomena existing among peoples who share religious beliefs, but among whom little penetrating cultural affinity is revealed in their dance?Before attempting to answer the above questions, we must call attention to the fact that dance did not play the important aesthetic role in Islamic civilization that it played in some other civilizations (e.g., in Hindu culture, among the Amerindians, and in Western Europe-America during the last few centuries). The Muslims were never able to quite resolve the uncertainty which they, as a people, felt over the legitimacy of dance. There are various explanations for this problem regarding dance. Perhaps all of them can claim some validity.

Dance and Self-Accompaniment

The interrelatedness of music and dance is acknowledged by ethnomusicologists and choreologists alike. It is also acknowledged that both music and dance can be analyzed separately for purposes of study, since one is primarily an aural art and the other is primarily a visual art; and further, because in many instances the performances are discrete, even though they usually occur simultaneously. However, when dance is self-accompanied the interrelatedness of dance and music reaches an apex; and both the dance and music must be studied in their relationships to one another. This paper suggests a number of considerations for the purpose of establishing taxonomies which could guide further studies of dance and self-accompaniment. The first consideration calls attention to the self-evident fact that dance with self-accompaniment has unique problems, and that, consequently, the techniques employed in self-accompaniment of dance will tend to be unique also. The most obvious problem here is that of physical capabilities and endurance. For example, consider the breath control needed in order to play a flute while performing an acrobatic dance. Or, consider the effect that agitated body movements would have on a human voice. These problems are usually resolved in one of two ways: either the performances are sufficiently simple so that neither the dance nor the accompaniment is complex, understanding that the effectiveness of the performance will result from the combined efforts; or, the performances of one or both are used to determine the style which results. As an example of the first, no doubt the many sitting dances found throughout Polynesia (and in Hawaii especially) were a compromise for effective performance, for by sitting while playing the instruments a more pleasing musical performance resulted, and at the same time, while permitting the music performance to be sufficiently simple, danced bodily movements with the arms and torso could occur at the same time. Today in Hawaii many of the dances which were formerly performed in kneeling positions only are now performed standing and with foot movements and even with two idiophones where one had been used formerly. In this instance the second point of permitting the dance and music to determine one another's performances can be noted, for the modern standing adaptations of the old kneeling dances have had to change in several aspects of performance techniques. Using the foregoing considerations as an introductory background, a categorical analysis can be made; illustrative examples are drawn from Polynesia, an area I have studied first-hand for six years. There are four basic kinds of self-accompaniment. They are:

The editor on tour in America

Where then did African music fit into this picture? How could it make sense in this far country, except in the light of the current anti-colonialism, anti-segregation and anti-communism? Here was one of my problems in lecturing on this subject at the kind invitation of over twenty American universities which had been placed on the schedule of appointments by the State Department agency, the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils. At each of the major Universities which had an African studies section there was little need for long explanations. Both the Faculty and students connected with this division had already a sound grounding in the physical and political realities of Africa and several of my general observations do not apply to these alert groups of well informed men and women. My task, as I understood it, was to suggest a new approach to the study of African people and personality in the present day, through the recording of their indigenous aural arts, and the careful study of the data obtained in this way.