The Brown Canon: Non-Western Perspectives in Sound Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Diam!” (Be quiet!): Noisy Sound Art from the Global South
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, 2020
The sound art scene is not limited to the northern hemisphere. Rather, it is globally distributed and has for decades also appeared in various manifestations and constellations in the Global South. Globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonization are therefore issues that are just as crucial to the field of sound art as they are for other fields of social and human science. These issues are slowly beginning to enter the academic studies of sound art. However, academic interest in these issues still does not equal what we find empirically in the field. If one surfs the Internet or travels abroad to visit urban areas in the southern hemisphere, one is likely to encounter artists and communities creating works of contemporary sound art. Some of these artists involve themselves in independent long-term collaborations across the hemispheres, while others work within or supported by public institutions, but by far the majority of them are organized in local independent groups or social movements. Curators in the Global North have noted this proliferation and have, in recent years, begun to expand the repertoire of sound art by inviting artists from the Global South to perform and exhibit at cutting-edge festivals and galleries. Many of these transhemispheric collaborations have emerged from particular historical, institutional, and social contexts and take place within a growing critical awareness of postcolonial and decolonial issues. I suggest that these changes require the development of new analytical and theoretical tools within the study of sound art, tools that allow for a rewriting of the history and theory of sound art from a truly global perspective. Such a rewriting of sound art history and sound art practices will have to be acutely aware of issues of globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonialization; it will need to integrate representations on the Internet with those of live concerts, installations, and interviews; it must reach out toward anthropological and ethno-musicological methods; and it should make aesthetic considerations central to its analysis. This chapter, and this section of the book in general, is a modest attempt to begin the work of learning to pay analytical attention to these global shifts and experiments in sound art. The ambition is not to map the entire world of sound arts, nor is it to develop a new fully fledged set of methodological and theoretical tools. The intention is simply to pay attention to these global changes, and through this to start a discussion about the paradigmatic shift that is long overdue in contemporary sound art studies. As stated in the introduction to this anthology, sound art is not an isolated entity. It is inevitably entangled in and emerges from related experimental art forms. This chapter therefore begins by tracing how experimental music and arts from and in the Global South have been dealt with by closely related aesthetic fields. It then turns to a reflection on my own experiences from the Indonesian experimental music scene by discussing the participation of Indonesian artists at the 2019 Club Transmediale festival in Berlin and compares this participation in the sounds art milieu of the Global North with experiences with these same artists during my exploratory fieldwork in Yogyakarta and Solo on the Indonesian island of Java in 2018. This comparison welcomes what we could call a “global turn” in sound art, a turn that calls for mappings of the “blank spots” geographically and historically, while also revealing the “blind spots” in the self-reflection of sound art discourse produced in the Global North.
Introducing Asian Sound Cultures
Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, sound, Technology, 2022
In this book, we bring together studies on sound in Asia by scholars from various backgrounds, and at various stages of their academic careers, working on and-in many cases-from Asia. By examining the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technology from across a wide geographical region, the chapters challenge us to rethink and reassemble categories such as sound and power, technology and imperialism, voice and its interrelations with politics, noise and modernity, the relationship between the global and the local in modernity, as well as the dominant binaries of West/ East or North/South, and colonial versus postcolonial. The work presented in this book acknowledges an important juncture in the study of sound brought about by the rapid increase of interest in and publications related to it. Whether we understand sound studies as an academic field or as a tool available to multiple disciplines (Hilmes 2005), research on sound covers numerous fields of research, differing historical and geographical contexts, and the challenging of familiar theoretical concepts (Smith 1994; Smith 2003). In particular, over the last decade or so, the geographical range of sound studies has rapidly broadened, and in this context, this book tackles the urgent question of how we account for the shared experience of the construction of modern sound whilst thinking it through and beyond the point of difference. If sound is a substance of the world, it is also an essential element in how people frame their knowledge of that world (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015, 2). Yet, despite increasing in geographical scope, studies of sound have too often been restricted to comparisons between European countries or between the European experience and that of the United States. Although much work on the West highlights national differences and brings out developments that have taken different trajectories and followed differing chronologies, the conclusions often highlight common ways of hearing, controlling, reproducing, and ultimately thinking about sound that stem from 'shared similarities' in experiences of modernity (Morat 2014, 3). This is, of course, as Sheldon Garon has noted (2017), an affliction of the transnational historical project more broadly. Nevertheless, as sound studies become increasingly
Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter, 2016
How can sound be analysed as an expressive form which plays a crucial role in the transformation of culture? What are the ramifications for the ways in which scholars think about culture as a concept, if this sonic perspective is taken into account? This essay aims at demonstrating that sound is not a natural given, but part of complex cultural, social, and mediatised practices. Everyday soundscapes of the city, the varied sounds that are designed for mobile phones and other devices , the cut, looped and layered sounds of contemporary popular and club music these sounds constantly reconstitute the world in which we live and how we perceive it and make sense of it. Therefore, studying sound cultures means exploring the specific social and cultural functions of sound in a particular time and space, across different media formats, production environments and listening habits. The first part of the essay gives an overview of some of the recent approaches in the emerging field of sound studies and highlights the close interaction of sound, media studies, and importantly, postcolonial studies. Subsequently , two examples will be given which demonstrate how sound cultures can be studied as an amalgamation of sonic, medial and postcolonial practices and thinking.
CS640K-Sound, Aurality and Power An Introduction to Sound Studies Fall 2023 Tuesdays 8:30-11:20 AM
The ancient media formations attendant upon sound, orality and aurality comprise one of the foundational communicative practice of human sociality and culture. Yet, despite the deep anthropological and historical centrality of sound to the human sensorium and cultural creativity, it has only been in the last twenty years or so that "sound studies" has emerged as a distinctive field within (and alongside) media and communication studies. This course will explore the contours of this exciting emergent field, as well as the core concepts that orient the bearing of its scholars towards the critical analysis of sound as phenomenon, cultural event, and social practice.
2006
All three books under review have a connection to the study of sound in contemporary Canadian cultural studies. Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, recently began teaching at McGill University in Montreal. Aural Cultures, edited by Jim Drobnik, developed from a conference at Concordia University in Montreal and includes both scholarly articles about contemporary sound cultures and artworks.