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Plagiarism and the obligation of truth 16. )) 1757: Music and notes (at the foot of the page) 18. )) 1835: A great change in our customs 22. )) 1853: A listener in court 25. )) 1841: O ur portrait in a cartoon 31. Chapter 2 Writing Our Listenings: Arrangement, Translation, Criticism 35
Sound means: towards an epistemology of auditory experience
2013
The project constructs an account of the role of aural experience and soundscape perception in outlining an epistemology of auditory experience. Using ecological models, the project proposes listening and sound-making as situated, embodied, cognitive practices, and develops an account of acoustic epistemology as a form of supra-rational knowledge, based on a model of transduction between material sound energy and the conceptual. The practice of sound-making is proposed as a prosthetic 'technology of the self', and electroacoustic mediation is discussed in terms of mimesis and reembodiment.
Sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn
‘Sound studies’ and ‘auditory culture’ are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary eld of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material–a ective processes that lie ‘beneath representation and signi cation’, reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and o er a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman’s vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist – and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to a ect – than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge’s aesthetic theories are considered. Both are proponents of onto-aesthetics, the belief that works of arts can disclose their ontology. I argue that onto-aesthetics rests on a category mistake, confusing embodiment with exempli cation. Because of the confusion, Cox and Hainge slip culturally grounded analogies into their supposedly culture-free analyses of artworks. Finally, I re ect on the notion of an ‘auditory culture’, and suggest the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies is actually a form of‘ontography’– a description of the ontological commitments and beliefs of particular subjects or communities – one that neglects the constitutive role of auditory culture at its peril.
Organised Sound, 2019
Sixty years on from Pierre Schaeffer’s call for ‘primacy of the ear’ (primauté de l’oreille), this article asks an ostensibly simple question: whose ear/aural perception is being referred to when we talk of and compose under this guiding principle? Is there a tacit preselected audiometric norm or even a pair of golden ears, at its core? The article will problematise the uncompromising modernist notion espoused by Babbitt of a ‘suitably equipped receptor’ (Babbitt 1958), and posit examples of well-known composers whose hearing markedly diverged from the otologically normal, an acoustics standard from which A-weighted decibels is predicated (ISO 226:2003). In conclusion the concept of auraldiverse hearing is proposed and creative strategies that eschew or problematise auraltypical archetypes in sonic arts practice and theory wherever they may lie are encouraged.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, by Brian Kane, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, 336 pp., £44.99 (hardback), ISBN 9780199347841 / 2016, 336 pp., £18.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190632212 The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, by François J. Bonnet, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2016, 364 pp., £14.99 (paperback) ISBN: 9780993045875
“‘Hearing Deafly’: Reshaping the Geography of Sound in the Body”
The prospect of deaf hearing is a seeming oxymoron borne out of not only the hearing world’s assumption that deafness wholly prevents sound perception, but also the Deaf world’s insistence that sound itself is irrelevant. Former president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) George Veditz’s famous 1910 proclamation that deaf people are “first, last and for all time, the people of the eye” remains an imperative in contemporary Deaf culture, a view that often dismisses the relevance of deaf musical expression. This paper negotiates these conflicting ideals by theorizing what I term “hearing deafly,” a multi-sensory, embodied understanding of sound grounded in a deaf perspective. I draw on interviews with members of the Deaf rock band Beethoven’s Nightmare. While a non-deaf person may conceive of the auditory process as dwelling in the ear and auditory nerve, for a deaf person it shifts to the environment of the body. The members of Beethoven’s Nightmare credit their hearing loss with affording a greater sensibility to the vibrations of their musical experiences. One member describes sensing sound through an integration of seeing and feeling, creating what he calls “a sense of vibe to my body.” In the context of hearing deafly, an awareness of embodied vibration allows these deaf musicians to be conscious of the interconnections between people and sounds. I argue that such a sense informs our understanding of how music and sound create a sense of shared presence between the musicking participants, deaf or hearing. Decentering the ears from the hearing process draws attention to certain assumptions surrounding hearing and sound that are rooted in our culturally conditioned aural-normativity, that is, the idea that sound experiences are ear-centered. Similarly, the primacy of vision in Deaf culture risks overshadowing deaf multi-sensory engagements with sound. Reshaping the geography of sound in the bodily environment expands the boundaries of musical perception, opening our understanding of musical experience that blurs the binaries between deaf and hearing. Hearing deafly cuts across cultural-linguistic and audiological divisions to articulate an aspect of musical experience that is available to all bodies.
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies. With Stefan Helmreich. The Senses & Society 7(1): 72-86.
Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types -and as often essentialized sensory modes -make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how "deaf futurists" champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.
Towards a Materialist Conception of Sound as Thing
Organised Sound, 2019
This article proposes a conception of sound as the material of artistic experimentation. It centres on a discussion of the nature of sound’s ontological status and aims to contribute to a new understanding of the role of materiality in artistic practices. A central point of discussion is Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of the sound object, which is critically examined. The phenomenological perspective that underlies the concept of the sound object depicts sound as an ideal unity constituted by a subject’s intentionality. Thus, it can barely grasp the physicality of sounds and their production or their reality beyond individual perception. This article aims to challenge the notion of the sound object as a purely perceptual phenomenon while trying to rethink experimentation as a practical form of thought that takes place through interacting with sonorous material. Against the background of recent object-oriented and materialist philosophical theories and by drawing on the Heideggerian concept of the thing and Gilbert Simondon’s theories of perception and individuation, this article strives to outline a conception of sound as a non-symbolic otherness. The proposed idea of thingness revolves around a morphogenetic conception of the becoming of sonorous forms that links their perception to their physicality.