Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism

An exhibition held at Sydney Non-Objective (SNO) Gallery in 2015 documents a largely bygone genre, whose significance can be summarized along the following lines: that across two decades of activity there emerged an international language that successfully challenged the hegemony of staff notation by reinstating the interpreter as an active, indeed equal participant in the musical process. Just as importantly, the language by which balance between composer and interpreter was established escaped the stifling modes of ideological determinism evident in early postwar trends, such as the avant-garde movement of serialism and technological developments in electronics like musique concrete. By deepening an identifiably post-Cagean aesthetic, compositional processes became open-ended, allowing for interventions that enabled the musically untrained to participate in the making of musical events. Not dissimilar to the notion of the ‘expanded field’ in relation to sculpture, graphic scores helped enable music to migrate into different fields of creativity such as language, media and painting.

Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world. (Sterne, 2012 p.2) Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality. Metaphors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life. Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor, infusing words with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations. (Novak and Sakakeeny, 2015 p. 1) In recent years there has been an explosion of work on, with or through sound by researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Highly interdisciplinary and often undertaken in cooperation with those outside academia, from musicians to professionals, the field of sound studies is increasingly diverse, daring and exciting. Using sonic frames to think through how technology mediates relations, how cultures of perception are learnt and changed, and how the growth and diversity of mass media informs communication can help us develop fresh approaches to longstanding questions, whatever our disciplinary home. This interdisciplinary and experimental course into the cultural, social, political and material dimensions of sound and listening will challenge students to both rethink their existing ideas and develop new interests. We will explore questions such as: What is ‘noise’ and why do states seek to regulate it? How does culture shape sound? How does architectural practice change as cities become nosier? What role does sound play in film? What is the relationship between music and social structure? How does technology mediate listening? What can listening more and reading less do to academic practice? How do people listen to religion? How can sound be seen? What else do we listen with apart from our ears? Taking sonic mediums seriously, the course includes practical sessions in which students will learn how to create audio materials relating to the topics and theories explored in class. Structure & Aim The aim of this course is two-fold: firstly to interrogate some of the key debates in sound studies, secondly to acquaint students with some of the different skills needed to undertake research through a sonic lens. Touching on some of the most important moments in the development of the field, as well as contemporary debates, 9 of the 12 sessions will be used to help students situate their thinking within a body of scholarship that is seemingly in a constant state of emergence. The remaining 3 sessions (taking place once every 4 weeks) will involve practical learning and hands on engagement within and outside the university. It will push students to experiment with different ways of listening and researching – from soundwalks to podcasting to transduction. Students will develop public facing materials in these sessions, which may be published if of sufficient quality. Learning Goals Students will: • have an understanding of the possibilities sound studies offers for research within and across disciplines • become acquainted with some of the key debates in the field • learn how to do field recordings • learn how to make a podcast • learn how to transduce images into sounds • experiment with applying theoretical and analytical insights in work across different sonic mediums Instructors Internal • Ian M. Cook (CookI@spp.ceu.edu) Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Data and Society Lead for 6 sessions along with course design & management Please contact Ian for all questions or concerns regarding the course and the other instructors for questions regarding their sessions. • Cameran Ashraf (ashrafc@spp.ceu.edu) Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy Teaching Class 10 ‘Orality, Literacy and Technology’ • Jeremy Braverman (bravermanj@ceu.edu) Media and Visual Education Specialist & Visiting Professor Department of History Teaching Class 6 ‘Sound Design for Film’ and co-teaching Class 1 ‘Introductions’ • Dumitrita Holdis (HoldisD@spp.ceu.edu) Centre for Media, Data and Society Co-teaching Class 8 ‘Podcasting for Academics’ • Sara Svensson (svenssons@ceu.edu) Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies & Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy Teaching Class 3 ‘The Policies of Regulating Sound’ External • Judit Emese Konopás (juditemesekonopas@gmail.com) Independent Sound Researcher Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’ • Zoltán Kovács (zoltandotkovacs@gmail.com) Interaction Designer, musician – Budapest Metropolitan University & Elefant Teaching Class 12 ‘Transduction and Sonification’ • Lucia Udvardyová (ludvardyova@gmail.com) Journalist, Musician, Organizer/curator, DJ – Easterndaze/Baba Vanga/SHAPE Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’

2010

"Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall articulate and defend a position according to which an adequate phenomenology of auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of such events."

Seismograf/DMT (special issue: Sound Art Matters), 2017

Can ‘sound’ be ‘exhibited’ as an artistic object? Is the notion of exhibiting sound not a fallacy, considering the nature and characteristics of sound, predominantly emerging as an ephemeral and immaterial phenomenon? This question problematises the positioning of sound art in the contemporary field of artistic and curatorial practices, demanding a new set of theoretical approaches and methodologies. Addressing this fundamental question from a conceptual leaning, in this article I will try to examine sound’s specific subjective inclination as artistic experience beyond the material object.

2021

What does a one hour contemporary orchestral piece by Georg Friedrich Haas have in common with a series of glitch-noise electronic tracks by Pan Sonic? This book proposes that, despite their differences, they share a particular understanding of sound that is found across several quite distinct genres of contemporary art music: the ecstatic-materialist perspective. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is considered as a material mass or element, unfolding in time, encountered by a listener, for whom the experience of that sound exceeds the purely sonic without becoming entirely divorced from its materiality. It is "material" by virtue of the focus on the texture, consistency, and density of sound; it is "ecstatic" in the etymological sense, that is to say that the experience of this sound involves an instability; an inclination to depart from material appearance, an ephemeral and transitory impulse in the very perception of sound to something beyond-but still related to-it. By examining musical pieces from spectralism to electroacoustic domains, from minimalism to glitch electronica and dubstep, this book identifies the key intrinsic characteristics of this musical perspective. To fully account for this perspective on sonic experience, listener feedback and interviews with composers and performers are also incorporated. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is the common territory where composers, sound artists, performers, and listeners converge.

Music & Letters, 2014

2016

Published with audio examples in Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures (Vol. 5, 2016): www.interferencejournal.org/the-bright-sound-behind-the-sound/ This paper responds to a recent article by American sound artist Kim Cascone in which he asserts that the presentation of environmental recordings as ‘sonic art’ is often crucially lacking in some form of ‘soul’ or vitality. Cascone suggests that it is the responsibility of an artist working with real-world sounds to enter a more imaginative engagement than precedents within the field (and within the wider field of sonic arts in general) have historically presented. The paper briefly explores historical impulse to deprecate the importance of imagination, along with the imaginative implications of discourse around what Katharine Norman (1996) calls ‘real-world music’. From here, we explore the relationship between imagination and sound in two pieces of sonic art and argue that one response to Cascone’s call for an imaginative turn can be found within the idea of the ‘symbol’ as codified in Romantic poetic discourse (after Kathleen Raine’s reading of Coleridge). The paper explores the way in which a cultivation of an ‘imaginative perception’ can be used to elucidate such symbols in a compositional context and relates the creative and interpretive use of ‘sound-symbols’ to both Voss’ methodology of the imagination (2009) and Thomas’ multidimensional spectrum of imagination (2014).

Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2021

Basing ourselves on Marx's method of historical materialism, this article builds on Marxist literature on capitalist abstraction and focuses on the struggle for differentialization. This amounts to a critique and, more importantly, an affirmation: elements of the future exist in the present. This is a future in which the force of capitalist abstraction is overcome through a new social order. This is not only a political struggle, but a pedagogical one as well in that it involves distinct educational logics with particular subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities, which are elements of communism that exist in the present. The pedagogical gesture developed here is one of desubjectification, through which we encounter the world and ourselves as unknown and mitigate against capitalist individualism and abstraction. In the end, we suggest that sound education offers one such path.

This essay examines how Brewster's use of sound as a medium for sculpture also connected his practice to performance art and the new media movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Leonardo Music Journal, 2016