Abstract

 Kevin J Gordon1; Matthias Kispert 2, 3 Andile L Sibiya 4,5 
 
1 Department of Music, College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; 
2 Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London, UK; 
3 London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK. 
4 Discipline of Otorhinolaryngology, School of Clinical Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; 
5 KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health, South Africa 

Operating rooms are typically noise filled environments, where polyrhythms and polyphonics of human and non-human sounds collide. In this paper the operating room soundscape is used for relational ethnographic exploration, framed in critical affect theory, and brings together insights from medical sociology and sound studies.  

This paper is set in an operating theatre where cochlear implantation surgery is taking place. In the process of surgically enabling sound perception.  Sounds within the operating room are found to have agency warranting conscious perception.  Within the composition, we reflect on multiple interdependencies through sound, between individuals, teams, tools and machines.  Through inclusion of human and non-human sounds we see chaos and conflict, independence and co-dependence, and ultimately collaboration in a shared goal of both human and non-human elements to achieve the best outcome for the patient asleep on the operating table.  

In this paper sounds are intrinsic essential actors as sound perception is surgically restored.  Sound is acknowledged in its action as a key component of the operating room team. 

Abstract

In the audio-paper Fear of Weakness: Songs to Agitate the Man, artist Morten Poulsen builds on his project Boys Will Be… (2022), in which he met with young cis-men to have conversations about vulnerability, intimacy and masculine norms. In the end of these meetings, Morten recorded the men giggling, and these recordings were then presented as a sound installation. Listening back to these recordings, and informed by both sound and gender studies, Morten explores the deficiencies of masculinity norms and the fear of being exposed as non-masculine. How might the sound of giggling cultivate a softening of hardened spaces, and encourage a reflection on the way that men relate to each other? How might the sound of giggling men serve as a noise in the patriarchal system?

Abstract

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by »rejecting the solidity of a frame« (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged between minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance sounds a formless formation, exploring integrity and wholeness among Black and Indigenous collectives that organize via radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about individual moral virtue but rather a collective ontological state of being whole.

Abstract

This audio paper explores the »acoustic territory« (Labelle, 2010) of Peckham Rye Lane through my sonic journey as a Peckham resident, practitioner, and researcher. My relationship with this place has expanded throughout my studies, moving beyond the simple notion of documentation or representation from an »outsider« angle. Instead, as a resident, I have apprehended my methodologies of listening and representing sound through my everyday life of living in Peckham and my involvement with different community groups. 

Abstract:  

For over 4000 years, the Inuit in Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is called in Greenlandic, have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic. Their knowledge of how to survive under such harsh conditions has been preserved and passed on via sound through the millennia. For the Inuit, storytelling and frame drum singing and dancing have sonic agency. They give them the energy they need to survive and thrive in the cold. The powers of these sounds and their misconception by missionaries and colonizers as addressing pagan or even evil forces led to the ban of the qilaat, the Inuit frame drum, from churches and public spaces. After the suppression of these sounds for around 300 years, in December 2021 Inuit drum dancing and singing has been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But despite this huge acknowledgment, the fight for the revitalization of the qilaat is far from over, as the case of the Greenlandic ex-priest Markus E. Olsen shows. 

Abstract

The article analyses the genre of listening scores – texts written in a natural language that provide the readers with instructions to listen in a certain way or to a certain kind of sounds. Belonging to the broader category of text scores, they are instrumental texts that are at the same time often poetic in their form and/or evocative in their language. As such, listening scores can be thought of as monomedial and intermedial at the same time. On the one hand, their material form is that of a written text, not augmented in itself by any other media. On the other hand, the reading of a listening score is necessarily transitory, oscillating between the aesthetic experience of the text itself and the aesthetic experience of listening induced by the text. Although originating in 1970s, the genre has been growing in prominence in recent years, as exemplified by the project A Year of Deep Listening that collected 365 listening scores by a diverse group of artists to commemorate the 90th birthday of the composer Pauline Oliveros.

Abstract  

This audio paper explores the phenomenon of voice-based technology in the smart-home. Through ethnographic interviews we study how older people use voice-based technologies and with what effects for their experiences of the affective environment in their homes. We followed nine people over the age of 65 online and onsite in their private homes in or nearby Copenhagen during the covid lockdown. We used Google nest smart speakers as cultural probes and followed the participants over the course of six months of integrating and using the new technologies in their homes and everyday lives.  

Our research explores how voice-based technologies participate in creating affective environments in older people’s homes and seeks to address the mundane, unremarkable, and often unspoken experiences and affects related to voice-based technologies and smart homes, which is a largely absent theme in the research on this topic.