Tuesday 22 December 2009

Call for papers: Sound studies konference in Århus, september 2010

Sound as Art - Sound in History, Sound as Culture - Sound in Theory
Conference on sound studies
University of Aarhus, Denmark
September 23–25, 2010

Call for papers

Today, sound studies provide an important framework for furthering cultural research related to a broad range of historical and contemporary issues. Also, sound studies contribute to the understanding of currents in social and global activity increasingly determined by auditory, sonic, and communicative materiality. At the same time, the exploration of auditivity and auditory cultures raises a series of significant aesthetic, medial, historical, cultural, and theoretical questions.

Cultural changes related to globalization and digital media have questioned traditional paradigms of vision containing notions of visual representation, semiotics, and a hermeneutics based on reading. Such changes suggest an auditive paradigm in which modes of interaction, mobile communications, and spatial and geographic fluidity lead to a renewed sense of orality and listening. In research this new paradigm is establishing itself as the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. It draws on disciplines such as musicology, performance studies, art history, anthropology, cultural studies, urban studies, and histories of technology and media while influencing these disciplines with new modes of reflection on and examination of their respective methodologies and subsequent political effects.

The aim of the conference is to profile contemporary sound studies as an interdisciplinary field of studies and to contribute to the discussion and development of the auditive paradigm in general. Key concepts like 'acoustemology', 'acoustic space' or 'sonic environment' might be reflected upon and developed as well, both at a theoretical level and with regard to specific cultural, medial and aesthetic contexts.

The programme of the conference will consist of keynote lectures, plenary roundtables, thematic workshops and individual presentations. Individual presentations and entire workshops may draw inspiration from the following array of questions:
  • What is the experiential framework of listening and auditive culture, and how is the world constituted (identity, locality, sociality, culture etc) through auditive practice?
  • How has musical and technological sound production and perception changed through the last century and how has it contributed to everyday soundscapes, the concert hall, and the media?
  • What can we know, i.e., what types of knowledge, identity and meaning are made possible through acoustic practice – are there any limits to sound taken as an experiential framework and as cognition?
  • What perspectives might arise from current studies of auditory modes of relating to space, of appropriating, expressing and designing social environments?
  • How does sound help define urban environments, and how might issues related to urban planning, architectural design, and noise benefit from a deeper and more complex understanding of sound?
  • What are the correlations between listening and other sensory modalities, the body, sociality, materiality, technology and media (sound viewed as a cognitive paradigm isolated from actual resonating sound).
  • How do auditive practices appear to be conventional or normative? How do auditive practices, in conjunction with other sensory modalities, articulate value, aesthetics, ethics and morals in culture?
  • How do we further the development of academic terminologies for dealing with sound?
  • How can transgressions of traditional distinctions between sound, music and art be understood in a socio-cultural perspective?
  • What do the specific aesthetic aspects of sound art seek to achieve in contrast to the predominance of visuality and modes of seeing within the arts?
  • How is artistic and academic education in sound competence developing?

Proposals for presentations (20/10 mins) or workshops (90 mins) must be submitted to the conference organisers/programme committee by April 1, 2010 as an email attachment (rtf/pdf/doc) to soundstudies@hum.au.dk.

Please include the following information: Paper abstract and title (max. 200 words), name(s), affiliation, e-mail, and technical equipment required (PC/DVD/CD/data projector/over-head projector/etc.).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than May 3, 2010.

Keynote speakers are Dr. Penelope Gouk (University of Manchester), Dr. Jean-Paul Thibaud (CRESSON), and professor Adam Krims (University of Nottingham).

The official language of the conference is English. The conference fee is 1.000 D.Kr/€135. Please contact one of the organisers mentioned below in case you need more information.

The conference is organized by the "National Research Network on Auditive Culture"(http://auditiveculture.ku.dk/), the research project "Audiovisual Culture" (http://www.ak.au.dk/en), and the Nordic Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

Hz #14

Hz #14 December 2009:

Metal and Wind: Bertoia and the Space of Reverie by Michael Filimowicz

"Offering to the Wind, as the Bertoia sound sculpture is now known, offers one possible solution to the problem of soundscape design for the city's places of leisure and reverie...It reverses a certain urban deafness, returning the possibility of silences between sounds, producing a quietude in the midst of the city roar."

Embodiment and Technology: Towards a Utopian Dialectic by Belinda Haikes

"David Rokeby's A Very Nervous System and Steve Mann's Wearable Computer are discussed in this essay as examples of "Utopian quest for technological embodiment... ... that seeks to move beyond the anxiety of new media and to position our culture to examine the space between the ultimate dialectics, that of man and the machine."

Sensory Substitution by judsoN

"There is some debate whether cases of sensory substitution are the results of imaginativeness, psychological effects or neurological (mis-)wiring....We have evidence such substitutions do happen....Whether or not Wagner, Klee or Kandinsky actually had synesthesia, there is a rich history of people equating one type of sensory stimuli for another."

Chong! A Parallel Environment by Joaquin Gasgonia Palencia

"Chong! endeavors to showcase an interfacial encounter between humans and robots, much like human peers meeting for the first time, without the robot having to fulfill a function.... The end purpose of this environmental installation is to give the human a small window into how a robot may perceive humans and how it processes that information."

Artistic Textual and Performative Paths in New Media Correlations: An Interview with Annie Abrahams by Evelin Stermitz

"Evelin Stermitz' interview with net artist Annie Abrahams, whose "works are structured on both digitized hyper and on site realities. She constructs forms of collective writings on the net and reconstructs them into offline perceptions, which leads to creations of net-operas and other web based interventions."

Progressions: Toward a Poetic Improvisation of Listening by Brian Schorn

Brian Schorn's poems here "...are an attempt to create a writing environment parallel to that of musical improvisation...by using the Surrealist technique of automatic writing while listening to a representative number of improvised recordings....Six classifications of improvisation and nine composer/performers were used to generate the writings..."

Hz Net Gallery presents 6 net art works:

Buffalo weekly videos by Alysse Stepanian,

The Natual "High-Times" Sound Shuttle by Rudi Punzo,

Baptize by Aaron Oldenburg,

In His Memory (Starman) by Aaron Higgins,

Keyword Intervention by Owen Mundy and

Radiant Copenhagen by Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum

Sunday 6 December 2009

Some upcoming conferences 2010

The second International symposium on ambisonics and spherical acoustics will be held on May 6-7, 2010, at IRCAM, Paris. Read the call for participation for information on how to submit papers and demos. The previous conference was held in Austria 2009. Proceedings are available online.

The 7th Electroacoustic music studies conference will take place in Shanghai, June 21-24, 2010. This year's theme is "Teaching electroacoustic music". Read the call for papers for more information. Proceedings from previous conferences are available.

The 7th Sound and music computing conference, Barcelona, July 21-24, 2010, is open for both paper and music contributions. The concert hall has an octophonic system. Earlier proceedings are searchable online.

The 13th International conference on digital audio effects will be held in Graz, Austria, September 6-10, 2010. For more info, see call for papers; links to previous conferences/proceedings are at the main DAFx web site.

Updated December 6, 2009; originally posted November 23, 2009.