By Bonnie Han Jones

Abstract

This work is a binaural audio essay and designed to be listened to with headphones to fully experience the immersive, spatial, auditory elements.

If we begin with the premise that Salome Voegelin sets forth in The Political Possibility of Sound, which is that sound affords political, worldbuilding possibilities, then this sound paper imagines the complex and contradictory worlds of transnational and transracial Korean American adoptee citizens. It sonically elaborates on the complex entanglements of the political and personal through the sonic archival practice of one such adoptee. It proposes that in these everyday soundings, voicings, expressions, we actively generate and negotiate questions of belonging and nationality at every sensorial level. 

What knowledge do the messy unanswerable interactions between our bodies and histories together offer towards an understanding of the top-down definitions of citizenship imposed by the State? How do the porous, relational logics of sound and sounding disrupt these standardizations and rationalizations of belonging as they attempt to recast "person" "natural/unnatural" and "citizen" against their supremacist definitions? 

How do adoptees, displaced subjects, build their own sonic belonging through collaboration and generative art practices? Can sound and its articulation and transformation through art and music get to the very heart of these politically and biologically intimate questions of who and how we belong to ourselves and to each other? 

Audio paper

Technical note

Sounding Missing Persons uses archival audio sources from historical audio from the Korean War, interview material with artist Mary-Kim Arnold, a writer, visual artist and Korean adoptee, audio citations from panel discussion with Korean adoptee scholar Eleana J Kim and adoptee filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem, presentations from sonic theorist and practitioner Salomé Voegelin, appropriated field recordings from freesound.org, and original electronic music. The work uses digital music techniques such as granular synthesis, convolution reverb, sampling and spatial (binaural) audio techniques that stand in as affective sonic metaphors for the transformation of audio material, the manipulation of the "grain" of sound in the archival material, the conjuring of alternative sonic spaces and places.