How to Study Sound?

Wednesday 18 September

Thursday 19 September

Friday 20 September

Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange a.k.a Snack Syndicate

Andrew Brooks is a lecturer in Media and Culture in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW. Astrid Lorange is a senior lecturer in Art, Writing, and Cultural Theory in the School of Art & Design, UNSW. Together, they make texts, installations, public programs, and study spaces as the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. Their collection of essays, “Homework”, was published in 2021 by Discipline. They are currently completing a book titled “The Art of Unmaking: The Aesthetics of Abolition in Australia”.

Abstract: Listening against state power

This presentation will propose “fugitive listening” (Brooks, 2020) as a critical response to state-managed violence. If state power has primarily been understood according to visual paradigms – seeing like a state; technologies of surveillance; politics of representation and recognition – then we ask what it might mean to tune its sonic registers. Anthems, chants, screams, slogans, shouts, poems, and silence will be considered through a series of short case studies and listening exercises that will ask how the state ‘sounds’ and how state power is refused, resisted and survived through sonic cultural forms. We will draw on our current book project “The Art of Unmaking: The Aesthetics of Abolition in Australia”, Brooks’s manuscript “Shouts and Whispers: Fugitive Listening and the Noise of Crisis” in which “fugitive listening” is theorised, and recent work by Lorange on the sonic conditions in which the law is spoken, heard, and enacted.

Victoria Bates

Victoria Bates is Associate Professor in Modern Medical History at the University of Bristol. Her Future Leaders Fellowship, “Sensing Spaces of Healthcare” (UKRI, 2020-24/27), brings together history, medical humanities, spatial/sensory studies and design for the first time. She is author of a range of articles and books relevant to the European Healthcare Design Congress, including “Making Noise in the Modern Hospital” (CUP, 2022).

Abstract: Seeking Sound Memories: Beyond the archive

This session will think about ways we can explore memories of sound, drawing on methods developed in the project "Sensing Spaces of Healthcare". It will think about how we can get beyond cultural frameworks such as noise to capture more of the atmospheric and qualitative aspects of sound memories. The workshop will have some light-touch interactive elements to showcase mapping and line-drawing methods, so please have paper and pens on hand if you are joining online.

Michael Bull

Michael Bull is Professor of Sound  Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is book series editor of The Study of Sound with Bloomsbury and series editor of Sound in Urban and Popular Culture (Routledge). He is a founder editor of the Senses and Society Journal and The Sound Studies Journal (both with Routledge) and is author of numerous academic books including “Sound Moves” (Routledge 2007), “Sounding Out the City” (Bloomsbury 2000) and “Sirens” (Bloomsbury 2020) He is co-editor of “The Auditory Culture Reader” (with Les Back) and editor of the “Routledge Companion to Sound Studies” (2018). His most recent publication is the co-edited “Bloomsbury Handbook  of Sonic Methodologies” (2020). His monograph “Sonic Experience of World War One” will be published in 2025 as will “Sonic Diasporas” co-edited with Malcolm James both with Bloomsbury.

Abstract: The Sounds of Warfare: From the Iliad to the Battle of the Somme

The talk will investigate the methodological and epistemological challenges in providing an historically informed sonic analysis of war focussing on the writing of my forthcoming book Sonic Experience of World War One: Fragments, Traces, Variations (Bloomsbury)

Sharin Foo & Louise Foo

Sharin Foo & Louise Foo a.k.a. SØSTR. An avant-pop sibling duo, whose practice and artistic research collaboration merge together their experiences from Sharin’s background in internationally acclaimed rock duo The Raveonettes, and Louise's practice with interactive sound installations and utilization of new technologies in artistic contexts as a graduate from The Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP, NYU). Sharin is an assistant professor at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen Denmark and Louise works as an independent artist. The duo have been collaborating on an artistic research project from RMC called Voicing Spatial Songs which explores the artistic potential within a spatial sound practice

Abstract: Spatial sound practise - new approaches

In recent years it has become a real possibility for artists like ourselves to engage with spatial audio technologies - allowing us to move beyond the stereo-centric paradigm. Spatialization has so far mostly lent itself to avant-garde traditions, electronic music and sound art. But as technologies are moving fast, artists, songwriters and musicians from all genres are called upon to contribute to this development – not only in following and fitting into these new formats, but shaping them through engaging artistically with them. SØSTR will present how we have been approaching the transition from a stereo-centric to a spatial sound practice. We will reflect on our process, strategies, results and future potentials.

Sanne Krogh Groth

Sanne Krogh Groth is Senior Lecturer and Manager of Research and Research Education in Musicology as well as Director of the Sound Environment Centre at Lund University, and is editor-in-chief of Seismograf Peer. Her research concerns historiographic, aesthetic and political issues within the fields of contemporary music, electronic music and sound art. Publications include “Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music” (Kehrer Verlag, 2014), “The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art” (co-edited with Holger Schulze; Bloomsbury, 2020) and “Negotiating Noise” (with James G. Mansell; Lund University, 2021). She is PI of the research project Java-futurism. Chronotopes of Sonic Activism in Indonesia (https://javafuturism.blogg.lu.se).

Abstract: Editorial Practices at the Journal SEISMOGRAF

What is the sound of science? And is it really necessary to write about your research? For almost 10 years the online journal Seismograf.org have been working with these questions by introducing and developing the format of the audio paper: that is, peer-reviewed articles produced and published in audio format. Just like written articles, audio papers have an abstract, research question, and bibliography. However, unlike traditional articles, sound (music, field recordings, or interviews), dramaturgy, and composition are part of the scientific argumentation – what we call sonic argumentation.​ In the presentation we will hear snippets of audio papers, learn about our editorial practices and open for discussion of how the format can be further developed.

Dolores Inés Casillas

Dolores Inés Casillas is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute and Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is also affiliated faculty with Film & Media Studies, the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), and Applied Linguistics as well as a former Faculty Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. Author of “Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy” (NYU Press, 2014), which received two book prizes, co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the “Companion to Latina/o Media Studies” (Routledge Press, 2016), and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UCSB) of “Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning” (Routledge Press, 2018), her current manuscript, under contract with New York University Press, explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different sound media technologies.

Kirstine Lindemann

Encompassing spatiality, tactility, movement and sound, Lindemann’s work examines the space between you and I. Juxtaposing themes such as synchronicity and discrepancy, Lindemann explores the drive towards the other as a primal force and existential conflict. Here, the sound and the physicality of the body form the core in a sensory investigation of the place where human boundaries are blurred, the places we entangle and the places where we are delimited. Lindemann has toured widely in Europe, Switzerland and South Africa as both a musician and composer. She has received several prizes; latest the Pelle Prize 2024, and the talent prize from Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s foundation for her work as a composer, which in later years have been performed at a.o. Impuls Festival (AT), 2k+ Series (SRB), Klang Festival (DK), Trugschluss (DE), Echoraum (AT), Heroines of Sound (DE), Spazju Kreattiv – Malta (MT), Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE), Nørre Vosborg Kammermusikfestival (DK) Inter Arts Center (SE), Frequenz Festival (DE), Harpa (IS), Musik der Jahrhunderte (DE), Helsinki Music Centre (FI), Metropolis KBH (DK), Neue Musik am KULTUM (DE), Sound of Stockholm (SE), SPOT Festival (DK) among many others. Her piece, "further & back", was nominated for the European Radio Prize, Hidden Treasures Mixtape. It has been performed in numerous versions, among others by between feathers and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart. In 2023 it was released by Dacapo Records on Damkapellet’s critically acclaimed debut album, Demiurge.

Abstract: Cyborg Songs: About a Composition for Soprano and Ensemble

With a nod to Donna Haraway and her essay, ' A Cyborg Manifesto' (1985) about the cyborg as a social and feminist emancipation figure, I'm researching the potential of the human meeting with the machine, anno 2024. In the piece, "Cyborg Songs", I'm feeding artificial intelligence with fragments of opera which AI characters attempt to interpret with certain dialects and characteristics of the voice.
However, the machine intelligence falls short. Instead, through their failed attempts, AI opens up an opportunity to reinterpret the opera diva as a character. What does she sound like through the ears of an AI? This project shows the potential of the impossible and the doors we open when working with failure; it turns out to be impossible for the AI to recreate the opera fragments, it's impossible for me, the composer, to transcribe their versions and it's impossible for the singer to sing my attempts - Thus this talk is not only about opera and AI, it's also about the twists and turns of creative processes and the unexpected gifts of failure.

Kristin Moriah

Kristin Moriah is an Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She earned her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the most recent recipient of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship from the Bibliographic Society of Canada. Moriah was the 2022 recipient of the American Studies Association's Yasuo Sakakibara Prize. She was a 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research. From 2021-2023 she was the co-director of the Black Studies Summer Institute, a joint initiative between Queen’s University and the University of Toronto which sought to advance Black Studies in Canada at the graduate level. She is the editor of Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first collection of scholarly essays about radical Black feminist editor and activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary (forthcoming with Pennsylvania Press). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center. Her research and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, TDR, PAJ, Early American Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Matters and Sounding Out.

Holger Schulze

Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research moves between a cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He was visiting professor at the Musashino Art University Tokyo, at the University of New South Wales Sydney, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Currently he works on “The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies” (with Jennifer Stoever and Michael Bull) and on “The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums” (with Alcina Cortez, Eric de Visscher and Gabriele Rossi Rognoni). Selected Publications: “Sonic Fiction” (2021), “The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound” (2021, ed.), “The Sonic Persona” (2018), “Sound as Popular Culture” (2016, co-ed.).

Abstract: “The Terms Good and Bad Have No Purchase Here.” What might a practice theory of critical generosity look like?

In 2013, Jill Dolan wrote a widely circulated proposal for “critical generosity” - revisiting a concept she introduced in her 1991 book "The Feminist Spectator as Critic". More recently, in 2023, Cathy Hannabach gave a powerful keynote outlining some key principles of this scholarly practice – in relation to editing. This talk takes its start from earlier traditions of academic work, of editing and reviewing, of evaluating scholars' texts. It proposes an altered academic practice that has emerged throughout all the revolutions and reforms and cut-backs at universities worldwide in recent decades: this altered practice is, as a matter of fact, a practice of critical generosity. Within the framework of today's academia, in all their national and disciplinary differences, this approach might be a clear a necessity to perform rigorous and adequate scholarly work today and in the future.

Jennifer Lynn

Jennifer Lynn. Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, and author of “The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening” (NYU Press, 2016). She was awarded a Whiting Seed Grant in 2018 to complete the Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project. Her current ongoing community project, “The D.I.Y. Bing Punk Community Archive”, was funded in part by Art Bridges. Currently, she is co-editing “Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader” (Contracted with NYU Press) as well as a three-volume “Encyclopedia of Sound Studies” (contracted with Bloomsbury). She recently received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Howard Foundation for her current book-in-progress, “Living Room Revolutions: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s.”

Neil Verma

Neil Verma is associate professor in Radio/TV/Film, and director of the MA in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. Verma is best known for his 2012 book, “Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama”, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His most recent book is “Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession”, published in 2024 by the University of Michigan Press. He has also co-edited two books, “Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship” (2020), and “Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship” (2016), the latter of which won the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. Verma has been a consultant for a variety of radio and film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s film “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023). Verma founded the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies and serves on the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress.

Qiushi Xu

Qiushi Xu, Assistant Professor at the School of Design, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), China, is a scholar of Sound Studies and STS (Science and Technology Studies). From 2020 to 2022, Xu was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at SUSTech. In 2020, she gained her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, China, and she was in a joint Ph.D. program in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, U.S.A. She obtained an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries at King's College London, UK, a BA in Recording Arts (Sound Director) and a BA in Journalism from the Communication University of China. Xu has been conducting research about sound technology and sound art, the sound of musical instruments, noise and environment, sound and gender, and sound, body, and medicine in different cultural contexts. In addition, Dr. XU is a curator of sound who organized pioneering exhibitions of sound installation in China. She is regarded as one of the main figures in sound studies in China.