Sonic Dimension Research Articles

Mind map for cross-reading the glossary of urban morphology and soundscape research

Urban morphological research has a long-established and systematic method of analysis that provides a clear and shared research framework. Since the late 1990s, the International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF) has compiled a glossary of urban morphology for the agenda of urban researchers. The soundscape literature emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, there have been numerous studies dealing with the sonic dimension of urban complexity from different perspectives. In order to create an overarching framework, attempts have been made since the early 1970s to define the principles and processes of soundscape research. There is a comprehensive glossary created by the Wold Soundscape Project Team (WSP) in 1978 which has been of great importance for further soundscape studies. This paper argues that there is a link between urban morphology research and soundscape research. A cross-reading between the two glossaries therefore has the potential to offer an alternative reading of urban research by revealing the commonalities or differences in the sonic-morphological conceptual schemes.

Canta la Calle. Sonic affirmation and the politics of the carnivalesque in Cádiz

ABSTRACT This article combines ethnographic research and debates on cultural activism to challenge canonical views on carnival by positioning the festivity’s sonic dimension as an active force of placemaking that extends beyond the official timeframe of carnival. The paper centres on Cádiz, a Spanish city that celebrates one of the oldest and most influential carnivals of Southern Europe. Cádiz’s carnival is famous for the inventiveness of carnival groups made of local citizens who gather every year and dedicate months to prepare an original music repertoire. Seeking to expand our understanding of contemporary carnival, this article looks at how carnival in Cádiz has provided ground for a radical understanding of citizenship and political agency against neoliberal appropriations of the public space, as evident in the increasing weight of surveillance and gentrification. This article argues that carnival music provides a platform for radical ways of mobilising creativity to redefine placemaking.

Anahad Naad and Pictorial Resonance: The Halo and Sonic Vibration in Sikh Art

The halo is a familiar symbol across Buddhist, Christian, and Mughal art, but its role in Sikh visual media has yet to be acknowledged and examined. This article studies the Sikh halo in relation to key philosophical concepts of dasam dwar (the tenth door/opening, located at the crown of the head) and anahad naad (an embodied perception of an internally heard music). When viewed from a Sikh perspective, the halo emerges as an external marker of an internal attunement to the divine one. As spectators, we attune to the latent sonic frequencies of the halo, which reflect the spiritual attainment of Sikh Gurus and other holy figures. Sikh art allows the inner/outer dialectic of the halo to come into view: to our eyes, the halo signals spiritual realization, while to our ears, it invites us to contemplate the intensity of sonic vibration that resounds through and emits from the divine body in tandem with the expressive kirtan of Bhai Mardana and his rabab (a plucked chordophone). 
 
 Drawing on select artwork, I invite spectators to experience the sonic dimension through attention to the unique positioning of the halo in relation to the rabab. My critical focus on sonic vibration as suggested by a symbolic connection between the halo and anahad naad allows a concentration at the head to offer a new vantage point for understanding the iconographical presence of this symbol. This article centers Sikh art within the long history of the halo while highlighting how this symbol establishes a unique epistemological system of expressive meaning.

From the ready room to the battle bus: exploring militarisation through gamespace soundwalks in Fortnite

ABSTRACT While its candy-coated shell may provide a clever camouflage for younger markets, this paper acknowledges that militarisation has been made pleasurable in more sensuous ways. Deploying gamespace soundwalking as a method, we attune to the ways Fortnite's sound design rehearses the neoliberal citizen-soldier on a sonic dimension. Yet, its capitalist priorities both corner youth markets while letting young players experiment with counterplay. To arrive at this conclusion, this paper illustrates the application of a novel method within game and sound studies – gamespace soundwalking. In the case of Fornite where the narrative context is individual military victory, the affective atmosphere ought to be one of keen attention to warfare, ambience and combat events. But how is war specifically depicted there? What is the significance of the sonic environment in forming a sense of place? We argue that method must take us beyond a semiotic analysis of the sonic components of Fortnite; we need a real-time ethnographic exploration of gameplay. In so doing, we tune in to Fortnite's ear-candy sound design as it exemplifies neoliberal standardisation of sound environments – masking grizzly conflict zones – as well as consumptive priorities that reach spectacular levels and the militarised Taylorist perfection of the citizen-soldier.

엘리엇의 『황무지』와 톰슨의 『무서운 밤의 도시』

Starting with Eliot’s own acknowledgement of a particular debt toward James Thomson, this study closely compares Eliot’s The Waste Land and Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, and examines how the two poets’ interest in London as a subject is manifested in their works and how the cityscape is embodied in each poem. It may be easy to find the thematic similarities from the sterile urban settings between the two poems: the speaker(s)’ quest, the hellish city reality, and the pessimistic overtones. Based on a detailed analysis of both poems, this paper also discusses the types of factors that make The Waste Land a modernist poem, and The City of Dreadful Night a Victorian poem regardless of the differing eras to which each author belongs. The particularized visual images and the acoustic modernity of The Waste Land will be emphasized, as its fragmented sonic dimension including its polyglot and dissonant idioms, songs and noises, and its differing and diverse voices, is strikingly innovative and unique.

Moving past the sound-noise dichotomy: How professionals of the built environment approach the sonic dimension

Debates on the sounds of cities have focused on the often-used dichotomy of noise versus sound; yet for the decades of debate, few examples of policy, procedures, or case studies have made motions in acknowledging the diverse roles that sound plays in shaping our experience and understanding of the city: orienting us, creating memories, fostering healthy restoration, etc. To better understand the challenges that professionals of the built environment face in their everyday practice, we interview 22 professionals across six countries to understand how they interact with sound. Building on a substantial corpus of transcriptions using an multi-layered coding process, three approaches of how sound is considered and prioritized in practice emerged: policy, public health, and city user experience. These three approaches are operationalized according to the key concepts, decision criteria, and evaluation methods that frame what motivates each professional to consider sound in the context of individual projects. Finally, these considerations were heavily influenced by contextual factors including individual, locational, and organizational. Classifying the ways in which professionals consider sound in practice into these three approaches may serve as a better starting point for future communication and collaborations between research and practice. Further, it may better accommodate the inclusion of other types of artists and experts into the conversation on urban sound. • Professionals of the built environment (PBEs) face challenges in integrating sound in everyday projects. • Sound is considered using three approaches: policy, public health, and city user experience. • Each approach is context-dependent (individual, location, organization) and can rely on human- or object-centered evaluation • The identified approaches could guide future communication and collaboration between sound experts and urban professionals

Listening to the Post-script: Intersections Between Improvisation and Indeterminacy in Music and Education

This article begins by exploring how current educational research describes the role of improvisation in education. Drawing on Biesta’s (2017) discussion of the purpose of the educational task, it then argues for a broader consideration of the role of improvisation in education and its potential to positively disrupt traditional linear timescapes. While discussions of improvisation in education often reference jazz music, this study explores a broader range of indeterminate musical forms to gain different insights. Specifically, it translates Stern’s (1988) Table of Transformational and Musical Hierarchies into a framework for education to support educators in considering the role of improvisation in their design and teaching practice. The adapted conceptual model incorporates the dimensions of complex learning environments described by the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework as discussed by Goodyear and Carvalho (2014), and in the process, surfaces the temporal aspects of the ACAD framework for closer examination. The model highlights several factors that take on a more significant role in highly indeterminate educational forms such as silence, absence, openings, and rupture. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on ways in which technology contributes to enabling or constraining improvisational processes in postdigital education. The study contributes to research on the intersection between sound and education, and to making the sonic dimension of education one of more ‘intentional concern’ as described by Ford and Sasaki (2021).

Face à l’Opinion: Argentine Activists and the Sound of Solidarity on Radio Haïti-Inter

Haitian journalist and broadcaster Jean Dominique was widely known as a fiery and outspoken critic of corruption who used the airwaves of Radio Haïti-Inter to advocate for the country’s working people. From 1957 until his untimely assassination in 2000, he broadcast thousands of interviews with political and literary figures as well as in-depth reporting on Haitian life and politics. This article utilizes the recently digitized materials from the Radio Haïti-Inter Collection at Duke University (over five thousand entries) to explore a set of conversations between Dominique and Argentine human rights activists Nora Cortiñas and Rodolfo Mattarollo. In taking into account the complexities of South-South solidarities and the differential systems of status and power that inform these exchanges, I consider the radio as a transnational, racialized, and gendered space of interaction, tracing the sonic dimension of these relations. The focus on transnational, South-South solidarities decenters US or Euro-centric scholarship on both radio and human rights activism.

SOUNDING ISLAM IN CONTEMPORARY INDONESIA: The Transformation of Javanese Tembang

This article examines the relationship between sound and religion focusing on mediated religion and the transformation of sonic sensation. It studies a Javanese children’s song ( tembang dolanan) called Ilir-Ilir (Javanese pronunciation: [ iler iler ]) which is an example of a Javanese song bearing a deep philosophy, richness of interpretations, and modes of presentation. Examining the Javanese song Ilir-ilir , this paper examines the two dimensions of the song and the transformation of tembang dolanan into the Islamic ones through the meaning-making and sonic dimension to generate Islamic sensation. The analysis goes beyond the textual tradition -in case of the song i.e., lyrics and textual dimension of the song- as looking at the interpretation of the song and the sonic atmosphere of sound. The article further argues that the transformation Javanese Ilir-ilir delivers an important insight of relationship between sound and religion as to which sound contributes to the making of religious sensation and reverberates the mediated religion through sensational form.

To Be Like Water: Material Dramaturgies in Posthumanist Performance

Abstract This article explores how water performs on the contemporary stage. Drawing on theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Joanna Zylinska, we investigate water in its various dramaturgical functions as matter, medium, and metaphor to sketch performance alternatives that highlight nonhuman forms of agency. Focusing on the work of sound artist and geographer AM Kanngieser and their use of water to listen to the Anthropocene as well as on the Filter Theatre production of David Farr’s play Water (2007/2013), we want to highlight how diffraction and resonance alternately provide ways of rethinking traditional configurations of making meaning. The sonic dimension of water, in particular, turns into a productive site for manifesting the heightened relationality of the Anthropocene world. The article thus argues that the material dramaturgies of water show how the crucial interactions between science, philosophy, and performance manage to sketch new posthuman knowledge formations.

Res nulla loquitur

The concept of res nulla loquitur, the no-thing speaks, is a reformulation of the rule of evidence, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself. It is drawn from a careful examination of the recorded arrest of Sandra Bland in 2015, and the evidence collected in Texas’s subsequent investigation of her death while in custody. Engaging with what remains of Sandra Bland’s speech performatively by “listening while you look” (Moten), the article offers a critical reading of the rhetoric of self-evident truth associated with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence on lethal arrest and more recent audio-visual evidence of police use of lethal force against black citizens. To emphasize the sonic dimension of the terrain of struggle with the violence of the word of law, each section is accompanied by sound loops the author created from evidence used by artist, lauren woods, in her exhibit, American Monument (2020). These sounds loops can be accessed at resnullaloquitur.com.

Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Abstract“Songs are knowledge” (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten‐year ethnographic engagement with Bengali‐speaking gurus and performers to discuss how singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily experience and exchanged among performers‐listeners to build togetherness in ways that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adopts Bengali understandings of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in their own right, I suggest singing as method and using the feelingful body as a research tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology's epistemic ethnocentrism.

Zen Chanting and Jazz at a Public Arts Festival

Abstract This article explores ritual change and innovation based on my participation as a saxophone player in two rituals featuring traditional Buddhist chant and jazz, which were performed at the Sōtō Zen temple Tōkōji in Ōmiya (Saitama prefecture) during the Yume Arts Festival. In designing these ceremonies, the monks selected elements from traditional rituals and put them together in new ways, while adding new entertaining elements, such as jazz and yōkai. I suggest that the modularity of rituals made it possible to easily create new ceremonies and perform them without extensive rehearsals. Moreover, I show that the monks aimed to offer an entertaining performance in order to reach out to the local community. This article further illuminates that Sōtō Zen has a rich sonic dimension, which our crossover ceremonies showcased.

Dancing Migration, Making Sound: Mediterranean Practices of Listening and Hospitality

The tragedies taking place within the waters of the Mediterranean, and the simultaneous reassessment of social and cultural politics inside Europe, call for our attention as scholars, and as art practitioners in the region. I will traverse this area to discuss some choreographic experimentations dealing with migration issues, and to prove how acts of listening in performance can emerge out of a racist narrative, allowing practices of corporeal hospitality to be envisioned. The sonic dimension is here perceived as the sharing of an event that occurs in the body, and among the bodies, and reverberates in multiple dimensions and directions. At the crossroads of post-colonial and performance studies, this article engages with listening as a political and creative act for both engendering and perceiving alternative ways of choreographing hospitality in the Mediterranean area.

Cantopop and Speech-Melody Complex

It is generally accepted that speech and melody are distinctive perceptual categories, and that one is able to overcome perceptual ambiguity to categorize acoustic stimuli as either of the two. This article investigates native Cantonese speakers’ speech-melody experience of listening to Cantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory in musicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonese speakers’ experience of the potentialities of speech and melody before they come into being. Speech-melody complex, I argue, does not stably contain the categories of speech or melody in their full-blown, asserted form, but concerns the ongoingness of the process of categorial molding, which depends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out the complex. It follows, then, that making a categorial assertion implies a breakthrough of the complex. I then complicate speech-melody complex with the concept of “anamorphosis,” borrowed from the visual arts, which calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectival distortion. When transferred to the sonic dimension, “anamorphic listening,” I suggest, is not about at which point a sonic object becomes “distorted” but is about one’s processual experience of negotiating the hermeneutic values in their differenthearing-ases. The listener engages, then, in the process of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories. Through my analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest that Cantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it is an important, yet under-explored, genre with which to theorize about the relationships between music and language.

Bringing music to the park: The effect of Musikiosk on the quality of public experience

Large parks have been studied for their tranquil and restorative properties, including in the sonic dimension. The auditory experience of users in small urban public spaces, such as pocket parks is less well understood, especially as they can contain sound sources much more reflective of dense, urban activities. Musikiosk, a soundscape intervention, was deployed in a small Montreal park that allowed users to bring their own devices and play their own content over publicly provided speakers. A questionnaire study (N = 197) revealed that users found the park more pleasant, eventful, and vibrant with the presence of Musikiosk, without an associated change in calmness or appropriateness, and better for their mood states than a typical park visit. Musikiosk also reduced the likelihood that park users mentioned hearing traffic noise. Those who were more noise sensitive experienced most of the benefits of both the park visit and Musikiosk, however it did not diminish their mentions of traffic noise. These results have implications for theories and policies concerning the sounds of public spaces.

Places of “heat and noise”: sonorous presence and the interstitial time-spaces of everyday life in contemporary Beijing

ABSTRACT Public parks in urban China have become places where elder and middle-aged city-dwellers join in varied group activities such as choral singing, plaza dancing, or traditional and revolutionary opera, to name but a few. While these places have been analyzed as a setting for a rich, everyday public life, the sonic dimension of park life has been relatively unexplored. Based on recent ethnographic accounts of encounters and performances in Beijing’s public parks, this article explores these practices as an intervention in the daily sonic order of the city, an active production of the textures of the everyday through “heat and noise” (re’nao). Using voices and technologies to perform in public, the display of sounds by parkgoers who experienced the Cultural Revolution echoes the loudness of those days while creating temporal assemblages of their own. Simultaneously, they reshape the patterns of co-presence and engagements among strangers, allowing for convivial interactions. Constitutive of the everyday, the tension between familiarity and strangeness, between routine and playfulness, is thus cultivated through “the sensorial production of the social” in ways that shape a pleasurable urban experience.

Listening to the Alice Books

Abstract Despite the ‘acoustic turn’ providing ‘a corrective to the visualist bias of much scholarship on modern and postmodern culture’, the Alice books and their author have been almost exclusively seen rather than heard by critics to date. Prompted by a collaboration with composer Paul Rissmann which resulted in a concert suite performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015, in this article I undertake the first detailed exploration of the sonic dimension of these texts. This merits attention not only because of its very emphatic foregrounding within the frame narrative of Wonderland, but also because of authorial interests and preoccupations, and the quickly established and still enduring musical afterlife of the books. Although triggered in Wonderland by the pastoral and by the sounds of the natural world, a process of translation or transformation renders a very different sonic landscape within the narrative proper. The bucolic frames an often raucous modern core, with Carroll embedding not only catchy anodyne melodies but also the sounds of the everyday and of contemporary industry, transport, and material culture. Attending to the rich and varied soundscape of Carroll’s best-known works sheds new light on their widely examined images but also restores a key dimension of the texts, essential to their Victorian reception. The detailed exploration of the full range of sonic phenomena within the works, from music to noise, and spanning both sound and silence, opens up new relationships between Carroll and his Victorian contemporaries, as well as further reinforcing his status as a proto-modernist.

A question of the sonic: problematizing Afrofuturism and its relation to Black Sound, with a case study of DJ Steloolive’s performance art

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the sonic dimension of Afrofuturist artefacts, building on contemporary theory pertaining to the speculative and aesthetic potential of Black Sound. The proposed case study focuses on a key performance held in West Africa by Ghanaian artist and composer Steloolive. The musical act is discussed with regard to the artistic media featured, as well as the strategies employed on stage, adding to the complexity of this contemporary genre. Moreover, special attention is paid to historical and contemporary references, as well as the transposal of sound into matter in the way the artist experiments with sound production and fashion statements. From the artist’s choice of attire to stage set-up and, eventually, to soundscape—performances of the kind Steloolive engages in are relevant to the discussion as they contribute to the widening of the Afrofuturist imaginary beyond the material and to the understanding of technological development as encompassing medium and genre.

The Power of Silence

This article examines the sonic dimension of police operations and occupations by tracing how the everyday life changed sonically in favelas in Rio de Janeiro during their occupation by Pacifying Police Units. I tune into the silencing practices of these security policies and conclude that a moral silencing of a racialized and gendered class of people takes place. A focus on silence helps us to understand sound as a technology of power, which enables the Brazilian state to operate along a gendered sonic color line. The cases I discuss are two instances of silencing that are a product of the operations and occupations: first, the silencing of the soundscape of the favela during police operations, and second, the silencing of funk parties. These ethnographic instances elucidate how racialized processes of negation of black subjectivity and black cultural expressions take place in the Olympic city.