Aural Qualities Research Articles

‘It's mostly an accompaniment to something’

‘It's mostly an accompaniment to something’

"Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn": Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss.

This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to a life briefly lived. Drawing on Caroline Levine's emphasis on the affordances of form, the essay first examines these elegies' aural qualities thorugh the motif of the echo. Next I attend to the shaping of the poems, and how their word placement gives weight to the experience of baby loss. Finally, I consider how the modes of address at the end of the two collections negotiate the possibility of moving forward.

Necropolitical Ecologies: Creative Articulations of Nature’s Death-Work in the Borderzone

In recent years, the increased incidence of migrant deaths along borders has transformed these zones into necropolitical spaces in which migrant lives are expendable in the pursuit of border “security.” At the borders of Europe, policies of “minimal assistance” leave migrants vulnerable to death by exposure due to the unpredictable currents of the Mediterranean, as occurred in the tragic case of the “Left-to-Die Boat” in 2011. In such instances, migrants are transformed into Agamben’s homo sacer; they are at once hyper-visible to the surveillant eyes of the law and are yet abandoned, “exposed,” in the “state of exception.” What is unique in the case of migrants who die at sea is how states and supra-states like the EU co-opt nature into carrying out their death-work in borderzones, producing what I call “necropolitical ecologies.” Armin Greder’s graphic narrative Mediterranean (2017) and Caroline Bergvall’s multi-disciplinary work of poetry Drift (2014) both elegize migrant deaths in the Mediterranean while demonstrating the sea’s presence as “vibrant matter” in the story of irregular migration. They each deploy unique formal strategies to represent the complex human/non-human entanglements of this death seascape. While Greder’s wordless visuals “excavate” the bodies that nature conceals from our eyes, Bergvall maximizes the aural qualities of language to covey the “drifting” effects of the water itself. As ecocritical texts, both works are engaged in a wider project of critiquing the colonial and capitalist exploitation of the non-human world. Through their portrayals of the necropolitical ecology of the Mediterranean, they suggest continuities between the violence transmitted to migrants in borderzones and that perpetuated on the natural environment around the world.

Visuality, Sonicity and Corporeality in Installation Art: A Conversation with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

This conversation paper examines the visual, sonic and corporeal entanglements that inform the work of the Vietnamese-American-Japanese artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. It explores the corporeal and aural qualities that are central to an understanding and sensorial experience of the artist's installations and visual practice. In paying attention to breath, sound and motion in visual art production, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's works reveal how corporeality and sonicity can dismantle the ocular-centrism of visual art. The discussions between Jun and Prarthana map the varied traumatic histories of racial colonialism, war and forced migration that haunt Vietnam's present, and bring to the surface the artist's aesthetic and political concerns around art, performance and cultural memory.

The Oral Aurality of the Radio Waray Siday

The end of print culture raises many disturbing questions about the position of poetry amidst these immense cultural and technological changes. What will be the place of the poet and his poetry in society now that we are at the cutting edge of technology? What will be the advantage of poetry in what Walter J. Ong calls the technologizing of the word? This study focuses on how the Waray siday as vernacular poetry from the margins emerges into a new form of oral history, known now as secondary orality, as it finds its way on the radio. It analyzes the distinct oral and aural qualities of the radio Waray siday as oral poetry, and how this soundscape somehow contributed to the characteristics of Waray language as reflected in the radio Waray siday. It illustrates how the interplay of orality and aurality create sense and affect in the radio Waray siday that makes it a revitalized, modernized, and powerful poetry. Analysis is grounded on the affect theory which posits that the affective power of the voice (orality), combined with the intimacy of the listening process (aurality), results in a change in behavior realized by listening to the reading of oral poetry; the orality theory which contends the intrinsic superiority of oral to written poetry, even in the age of print; and the radio inclusive theory which shows the link between the radio text, context, and reception. It describes the hybridity of the radio and its intertextuality—an exploration into a multidimensional phenomenon. This paper emphasizes that the meaning of poetry exists in relation to sound (letters waiting to become sound) and visual shape—that sound/shape articulates (and creates) meaning transcribed by a writing that “listens” to reading.

The soundscape of Islamic populism

Focusing on the failed coup attempt organized by a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces on July 15, 2016, this paper examines the soundscape of Islamic populism (Hadiz, 2016) as embraced by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its affective-auditory publics. Drawing on Althusser’s theories of ideology and interpellation concerning the Islamic call (Spadola, 2014), I explore AKP’s strategic use of Islamic sound as affect in governmentalizing urban space in order to understand the role that sound played in galvanizing support against the attempted coup. During the first twenty-four hours of the coup attempt, systematically regenerating discursive modes of Islamic rhetoric and sounds, utilizing the narratives of democracy, nationalism, and treachery to mobilize its publics, AKP re-cultivated the already existing polarized identity politics and recreated the sectarian spaces of belonging and otherness. I argue that AKP’s appropriation of sonic and aural qualities of Islam – particularly the public recitation of Sala (a form of Islamic call) – purposefully rechannelled the “ethical listening” (Hirschkind, 2006) of pious selves into a politically (re)functionalized listening in the populist reproduction of an Islamic soundscape. Such reproduction of the urban soundscape was responded to in a variety of ways by the mobilized auditory publics in service of the party while creating silenced private spaces of opposition.
 
 NB: The article contains sound examples. In order to listen to embedded audio files, you must first download the pdf file and then open it with Adobe Acrobat.

Density in diffusion, quantifying aural quality through testing and listening

Diffusion in recording studios and critical listening spaces has been around for well over 30 years. During that time, acousticians and users alike confirm the fact that it makes a difference in the listening space but have a difficult time defining exactly what it is or why they like it. Diffusion test data in the past have been inconclusive as to showing what makes one design more pleasant to the listener than another. This is especially true with in-situ testing. The in-situ testing shown in the presentation will be concentrated on diffusion density or the amount and quality of diffuse energy being reflected. This presentation will also show a set of experiments between different sets of diffusers used as side diffusion in a recording studio. The experiments, using a binaural head and calibrated microphones, will show both test data as well as recorded responses which will be played back to the listening audience. Lab test data, using the proposed ASTM diffusion test under development, will be included to show the diffuser differences from a laboratory perspective. Attendees will be asked to contribute their perspectives to the recording playbacks to further the experiment as to the listener's experience.Diffusion in recording studios and critical listening spaces has been around for well over 30 years. During that time, acousticians and users alike confirm the fact that it makes a difference in the listening space but have a difficult time defining exactly what it is or why they like it. Diffusion test data in the past have been inconclusive as to showing what makes one design more pleasant to the listener than another. This is especially true with in-situ testing. The in-situ testing shown in the presentation will be concentrated on diffusion density or the amount and quality of diffuse energy being reflected. This presentation will also show a set of experiments between different sets of diffusers used as side diffusion in a recording studio. The experiments, using a binaural head and calibrated microphones, will show both test data as well as recorded responses which will be played back to the listening audience. Lab test data, using the proposed ASTM diffusion test under development, will be included...

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.

Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth by Nicholas Chare (review)

Reviewed by: Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth by Nicholas Chare Zachary Ingle Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth Nicholas Chare London: I. B. Tauris, 2015 Despite the monumental gains in women's athletics arising from the passage of Title IX over forty years ago, sporting women still rarely get their due on networks such as ESPN and Fox Sports. Unfortunately, a similar imbalance is evident in narrative films and documentaries on sports. A notable exception is Nicholas Chare's Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth. An art historian by training whose previous books examined Francis Bacon's paintings as well as Auschwitz and the abject, Chare brings a fresh, multidisciplinary approach to how women, and particularly sportswomen, are depicted in film. Each chapter covers a different sport: climbing, boxing, team sports, track and field, bodybuilding, tennis, and surfing. Chare seems especially interested in how women filmmakers have depicted sportswomen, with discussions of films by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, 2000), Ida Lupino (Hard, Fast and Beautiful, 1951), Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002), Leni Riefenstahl (Olympia, 1938), Jane Anderson (When Billie Beat Bobby, 2001), and Drew Barrymore (Whip It, 2009, which serves as the epilogue) among those directed by men. In each chapter, Chare analyzes various visual texts about sporting women, but reveals an interest in their subnarrative dimensions, as well as a greater emphasis on the aural qualities of these films than most books akin to this one. Futhermore, the author sets each chapter within a different framework. For instance, in the chapter on women's team sports films, Chare examines how gesture functions as a challenge to gender stereotypes and restrictions. The title ("frailty myth") refers to Iris Marion Young and her now controversial work ("Throwing Like a Girl") on the feminine body in motion, suggesting that women differ in how they use their bodies for simple physical actions. Although the frailty myth forms the backbone of the first chapter, the author rarely returns to it thereafter, despite its prominence in the title. Chare even discovers connections in films that otherwise seem dissimilar, save for their sport: "Olympia, Personal Best and Fast Girls are all, however, united in their focus on sheens, either of sweat or of light reflective synthetic materials. There is a common fetish across the films" (103). He thus presents a new way of looking at these three films. Undaunted by the overwhelming profusion of scholarship on Riefenstahl, Chare compares the way female bodies are objectified and compartmentalized in films like Fast Girls to the male bodies and fascist aesthetics of Olympia. The chapter on tennis films compares its visual sportswomen texts—Wimbledon, Hard, Fast and Beautiful, among others—with the living "texts" of tennis stars who challenged gender and sexual norms: Martina Navratilova and Renée Richards. The strongest chapter may be the one on bodybuilding films, even if the plural is misleading: Chare focuses exclusively on one, Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985, George Butler). Thinking outside the box, he likens the film to the pornographic writings of Nathalie Gassel, whose erotic work privileges the fetishization of the muscle. Aside from the book's obvious value for gender studies courses or film courses addressing the representation of women in cinema, Sportswomen in Cinema could be used in sports media courses, particularly since there are so few book-length treatments on representations of women in sports media. Useful for both undergraduate and graduate courses, Sportswomen in Cinema might be paired with Viridiana Lieberman's Sports Heroines on Film: A Critical Study of Cinematic Women Athletes, Coaches and Owners (McFarland, 2014), or one could simply enhance the curriculum by adding an in-class screening of Pumping Iron II in tandem with Chare's chapter. The popularity of sports film continues to grow, and the genre has finally drawn substantial work in recent years. Yet most scholarship— [End Page 65] as reflective of sports in our televisual and media landscape in general—is resolutely androcentric. Chare's work offers a corrective to this scholarly neglect. Zachary Ingle University of Kansas Copyright © 2018 Center for the Study of Film and History

The Assessment of Aural Disturbances Experienced by A Church Located in Housing District of Bandung Case Study: GKII Pniel Bandung

Church as a sacred building is best situated in a surrounding which has an ideal aural environmental quality to enhance its acoustic performance as well as to enrich aural experiences of the worshippers. However, due to the lack of suitable site in urban context, in many cases church has to be located in the housing district with all its demerit factors, among others are aural disturbances which emanated from different sources. This study will assess the aural disturbances experienced by a church located in housing district of Bandung. The assessment will include major sources of aural disturbances, its intensity, and level of concern of the worshippers, using direct field measurement method and interview. Results of this study will display level of aural quality attained by this church, and appropriately propose relevant strategies to overcome the aural disturbances being faced.

Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne

Reviewed by: Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne Sean Morrissey Mahogany L. Browne. Smudge. Button Poetry, 2015. With her 2015 chapbook collection Smudge (Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press), poet, activist, and performance poetry champion Mahogany Browne explores the cruel complexity of inter-racial discrimination, familial strain, and anxiety within the African-American community. The “you,” to whom so many of these poems are addressed, might just as well be written back to another knowing reader who, too, has been the victim of bullied insults and ever-present reminders of a socio-cultural “ideal”: light-skinned, “good” hair, perfect curves. Consider, for example, the following passage from the collection’s opening poem, You brown dirty dark black blackest night midnight bluebl___k girl y o u soblk somehow you forgot your name. The full use of “black” and “blackest” are weaponized. They become two words within a string of abusive descriptors and quick alliterative pacing that read more like fisted jabs. One feels pummeled and picked apart, reduced to abbreviated shorthand (“blk”) or in pieces, incomplete (“bl___k”) as the speaker laments her unrequited “desire to be wanted.” Even the physical layout itself (Smudge is set in landscape, not a traditional portrait style) can be said to represent the speaker’s own sense of self, uniquely different and apart from the common shape of her contemporaries. It also provides ample room for Browne’s ranging, spatial forms to flow across the page, as in this excerpt from “When 12 Play Was on Repeat”: When you are a deep amber & your jheri curl is a distant memory & your shape is swollen in the perfect places & the boys remember your name & your first and last crush sings to you come here with a lilt in his walk & his tongue wags you towards him with its pale pink and you smile because you remember the sun wrinkles your darkness— Here, the page-spanning lines and foregone punctuation pull our eyes from left to right, building suspense and anxiety with each new detail. The scene comes together as memory itself, an associative collage of indelible detail and emotionality that feels absolutely present. The intimacy of the poem is further enhanced by its narrative structure, using interior monologue to reveal the speaker’s inner voice. “When 12 Play Was on Repeat” reels [End Page 24] in the sexual anxiety of adolescence, of first loves and wanting “a story for the cold tiles when there are only bra straps & lip gloss & hair brushes and smiles,” to be more than—quoting the speaker—a “blk girl mistake.” Browne’s poetry is a kick in the chest, immediate and natural as the spoken word. With five LPs, countless performance awards, and a longstanding role as the Friday Night Slam poetry program director at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side, Browne’s spoken word bona fides are stone set. And where poems written for the page make use of stanzaic structure, enjambed line breaks, and literary forms to greater effect, spoken word is ethereal by design. The audience must be made to see and feel every beat of the piece in real time. There is no room for pretense or encumbered prose to overwhelm the listener; rather, it highlights the unique emotional resonance of lyric storytelling. With Smudge, Mahogany Browne underscores the full range of her artistic power in poems that feel equally at home on the mic as they do on the page. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of this untitled poem: Cause you ain’t seen none of them praying/whenThey crack/baby skull/open wide/on the side-Walk/call it jump in/like a black child need toKnow/how destructive a leap can be/like hisBlack skin know what “in” mean/in the firstDamn place/they say family and gang/ beThe same/so it ain’t mean nothing different/ It is impossible to ignore the aural quality of these lines, from the speaker’s vernacular to Browne’s phrasal pacing. The piece nearly reads like something found, a moment of living poetry overheard and fused with all the nuance of written verse. The repeating trochees and Browne’s...

A hybrid way to navigate the city: visual and aural cartography of the city of Athens

Our experience of the city is formed through a constant symbiosis with a vast amount of printed information. In this article, we illustrate the aural aspects of those printed information in the urban space. We do that by referring to current discourses around visual and sound theories and by engaging contemporary open source technologies/software. The text is part of a wider design-research project which is in progress and which investigates the aural qualities of the printed information of urban space and tries to 'translate' the so called visual noise of urban space into sound. The article is based on the conceptual end of designing an app which will translate the visual noise of urban space into sounds.

A hybrid way to navigate the city: visual and aural cartography of the city of Athens

Our experience of the city is formed through a constant symbiosis with a vast amount of printed information. In this article, we illustrate the aural aspects of those printed information in the urban space. We do that by referring to current discourses around visual and sound theories and by engaging contemporary open source technologies/software. The text is part of a wider design-research project which is in progress and which investigates the aural qualities of the printed information of urban space and tries to 'translate' the so called visual noise of urban space into sound. The article is based on the conceptual end of designing an app which will translate the visual noise of urban space into sounds.

Educational Radio, Listening Instruction, and the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

This article examines the educational and social impact of an instructional radio program, called the Music Appreciation Hour (MAH), broadcast on the NBC network from the 1920s to the 1940s. Walter Damrosch, who came from a musical family and had previously conducted the New York Symphony, envisioned the possibility to use radio to teach music to American schoolchildren by tapping into its aural and emotional qualities. Through archival materials, including correspondence, teachers’ manuals, student notebooks, and program evaluations, it is argued that while Damrosch positioned himself with a new progressive movement that espoused student-centered education, he instead became an appealing on-air “personality” to student listeners and the network. This research serves as an important example of some of the ongoing tensions between education, entertainment, and the mass media.

Objective metrics, subjective descriptors, and their elasticity in the face of experience

Acousticians have long associated certain objective metrics with subjective aural qualities: C80 with clarity, for example. But the subjective quality of sonic clarity is complex and nuanced, and the descriptor means different things to different people. C80 describes the strength of early reflections relative to overall reflected sound energy. But these reflections may either help or hinder perceived musical clarity in different halls, different conditions of use, and to different listeners. New research, listening experience, and developments in room acoustics design challenge us to update our understanding and use both of subjective aural qualities and descriptors (such as clarity), and of objective metrics (such as C80). This talk will cite research (Lokki et al., Griesinger, etc.), project examples, and the author's own listening observations.

What a crescendo – not to be missed: Loudness on the musical stage

Abstract Recent research suggests that loudness, as an isolated aural quality, has an enormous ability to affect a listener’s emotional response to a musical performance – but loudness is far more complex than simply cranking the volume up or down. This article traces a history of loudness on the musical stage, exploring some compositional, orchestral, dramaturgical, and technical choices, in addition to a plethora of physical and cognitive phenomena, that contribute to a sense of musical largeness onstage, as well as its psycho-emotional consequences.

Whitman’s Atlantic Noise

Christopher Hanlon, “Whitman’s Atlantic Noise” (pp. 194–220) This essay considers Walt Whitman’s “A Word Out of the Sea,” from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, for its aural qualities—acoustically twittering birds, the hissing “undertone” of the ocean, for example—linking the poem to a wider antebellum interest in the electronic noise of telegraphy. I argue that this poem’s auditory effects bring Whitman into discussion with many others during the 1850s and 1860s who were interested in the sonic qualities of telegraphic noise quite apart from the words those noises encoded. Calling upon an array of cultural documents including songsheets, poems, fiction, and technical commentary, I suggest that “A Word Out of the Sea” condenses a singular moment in American intellectual life wherein the widespread deployment of telegraphic technology honed much interest in the interplay of sound and meaning. In this way, “A Word Out of the Sea” helps further current discussions over the resonance of nineteenth-century information technology among U.S. commentators (including poets), first-generation users who were less constantly focused than we might suppose upon the epistemological ramifications of the telegraph as a harbinger of unthinkably efficient, global communication. In many other ways, these observers of the telegraph were just as struck by the telegraph’s ontological properties, and especially the kinds of sounds it generated.

Sound and (No) Vision

The radio trailer (or radio ‘spot’) has been invisible within the recent expansion of academic work on the film trailer. This absence is, in part, because of its medium's perceived inability to offer the same level of montage of excerpted scenes, imagery and graphics as the film, television or internet forms of such trailers, yet also speaks to a wider absence of work that considers the audio qualities of the film trailer. This article challenges and problematises that tendency through analysis of the audio-only coming attractions found in radio trailers (for feature films) on UK commercial radio. Creating a basic taxonomy of approaches and techniques within the radio trailer, the article argues for more focus to be given to the aural qualities of trailers across media, and the importance of understanding the impact the aural surround of the radio station can have on the radio spot.

The Challenges of Writing in Irish in “I-Land”: Subverting the Western and Irish-Language Canons in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's “Oiléan/Island”

In the collections Pharaoh's Daughter (1990) and The Water Horse (2000), poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill considers the implications of (post)colonial cartography by reconstructing individual bodies as fig...

From “All of Me” to “All of You”

In this essay, I argue for a hearing of and listening for Benjamin’s concept of aura as an attributed and aural quality that is situated in the various intertwining contexts of performers, performances, and audience members. As an example, I consider specifically how the music performance of trumpet player Miles Davis comes to life for me in the spaces and the gaps that surround the various contextual clues I gather. This essay offers an example and reading of aura that can be extended to the criticism and understanding of music performances as events that happen in and beyond context.