How are artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems increasingly used to listen to, moderate, and sometimes amplify hate—through speech, sound, or silence?
This new Call for Proposals of a special issue of the legendary blog SOUNDING OUT! listens to how LLMs now decide which voices are heard, which are silenced, and which are misunderstood.
Guest editor Kathryn Huether invites essays (~1200 words) that explore the effects, the workings, and the historical backgrounds of this worrying and now almost expected use of non-human listening to simply generate more hate, aggression and all forms of oppression.
Your essay could listen to things like:
– deepfake audio, synthetic voices, and AI-generated propaganda
– creative resistance to hate and misrecognition caused by algorithms
– how speech recognition and hate speech detection by AI actually fortify the racialization of voices and articulations
– how non-human listening effectively reproducers and normalizes colonial, prison and nationalist ideas
2025-05-07 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on Noise Music
Do you ever listen to noise music, maybe even on the regular?
I did contribute to this survey a few days ago; just listening to the three music examples and then responding to the questions really did make me think again about this music genre.
So:
If you’ve got 15 minutes and you’re into noise music, why not give it a listen and see what you think?
Your responses will definitely add to the quality of this research project!
2025-04-28 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on Expanding Transdisciplinary Sound Studies
This new SOUND+Network seeks to achieve something truly outstanding and remarkable:
we want to extend transdisciplinary collaborations around, through, and with sound much, much further into the realms of the technical, natural, and medical sciences – and all other fields of expertise, craft, activism, and research.
Since its inception in the early 2000s, the new field of sound studies has served as a broad and truly transdisciplinary meeting place for researchers from all fields concerned with sound:
historical, sociological, aesthetic, anthropological, musicological, theological, media, political, literary or cultural studies in the humanities, artistic practices, acoustic research, sensory research, research on hospitals and medical practices, research on sonic subjectivities, affects and imaginations, research on the effects of sound in urban and non-urban environments, research on technologies related to the development, distribution and use of audio media, research on product development and professional audio communication, research on sound in the farthest reaches of our biosphere, sound in space, sound underwater, sound inside human and non-human bodies.
After some 20 years of sound studies, it has become clear that researchers in the technical, natural, or medical sciences are happy to collaborate with scholars in the humanities in the study of sound; indeed, such partnerships have become a true hallmark of sound studies, and very often scholars move back and forth between these fields on a regular basis, gaining, combining, and expanding their expertise.
But more often than not, experts from outside the humanities tend to see themselves primarily as visitors, representatives, as ambassadors, bringing their particular insights to the humanities and to sound researchers.
They do not seem to see themselves as an inherent part of sound studies.
*
This new network is therefore an invitation to sound researchers, scholars, activists, and craftspersons from truly all possible fields on this planet – especially from outside the humanities.
We are curious to hear, see, and experience all the insights into sound that the technical, natural, and medical sciences, as well as all other practices, disciplines, activism, and crafts, have gathered – and that will only broaden the scope of what sound studies will and could be in the coming decades of the 21st century and beyond.
You find all the details about the network, its founding memebers as well as the conference in Lund, November 20-21, 2025, at this link:
This workshop in October 2025 is set out to explore posthuman ecofeminism as a new way of thinking, especially through the transdisciplinary perspectives of ecofeminism in contemporary art, literature, and curatorial practice.
Make no mistake: the organizers do not explicitly address sound studies or sensory studies, but many of our colleagues in sound studies are working on some of these same questions the organizers raise:
“What strategies do artists, writers and collectives use to relate to the intersectionality of posthuman ecofeminism?”
“What perspectives of a posthuman ecofeminism have become effective in our post-pandemic present, and to what extent has the pandemic made ‘global frontlines of care’ (Krasny 2023) visible?”
“What alternative forms of writing, publishing and curating that take up ecofeminist critique of power and posthuman thinking can be developed from this?”
“How can modern and contemporary art, literature and aesthetics be understood anew through the combination of ecofeminism and posthumanism?”
So:
Why not give it a try and share more sound scholarship all across the borderlines of academic disciplines?
2025-03-24 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on AMBIENT MUSIC
Why does everyone listen to ambient music? It dawned on me early last year that a number of very different people, from very different backgrounds and of very different ages and social classes, are surprisingly united these days by their love of listening to at least one genre of ambient music. Whether at work or during yoga, while commuting or relaxing at the weekend or in the evening, as temporary calming agent to horrific ecocide and societies slipping mindlessly into fascism, or simply as a wholesome listening experience: ambient music seems to be one of the hidden champions these days.
I asked myself: Why does this genre have a kind of ubiquitous majority appeal in the 2020s? How do all the ways of producing, distributing and consuming ambient music relate to each other? Are new practices of production, distribution and consumption emerging? Which of these practices are particularly relevant across the planet, especially in the global south?
Together with Ulrik Schmidt, who has written a fascinating “Philosophy of Ambient Sound” (2023), we invite all practitioners and researchers, composers and scholars, producers and thinkers to join us in this endeavour to understand better how the genre of ambient music actually functions in this century?
With a deadline of June 1st, 2025, 12pm CEST we ask you to propose a presentation that could address, for example, one of the following areas
local ambient music scenes all around the planet
ambient music and digital streaming platforms
the distribution of ambient music
technologies for ambient music
mood regulation and affective control
subgenres and hybrids (such as Dark Ambient, Lowercase Ambient, Witch House, Isolationist Ambient, Goblincore or?)
ambient uses of music in architecture, art, design and film
ambient music in social media and audiovisual media
You can propose either a research paper, an audio paper or an ambient music presentation.
From the 15th to the 17th of September 2026, the conference will be hosted by our partner, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.
Please see our full Call for Paper for details of presentation formats, deadlines and contact details:
2025-03-21 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on Sonic Citizenship
Do you have sonic citizenship — or are you being mistreated as a sonic non-citizen?
In the latest Call for Audio Papers of the peer-reviewed journal SEISMOGRAF, the editors of the special issue SONIC CITIZENSHIP, Morten Breinbjerg, Marie Koldkjær Højlund, Jonas R. Kirkegaard & Sissel Raahede Lundgård from the Center for Sound Studies, Aarhus University. call for papers on topics such as:
communal sound-making and how it can promote social cohesion or fragmentation, a sense of belonging or exclusion, negotiation of noise conflicts, the right to sound and the right to silence, attunement to the sounds of others, surveillance and sonic policing, interspecies co-existence facilitated by sound?
Deadline is:
***May 1, 2025***
The full text of the CfP with all details about the format, the audio abstract and the audio paper can be found – right here:
2024-11-05 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on ERASMUS Course: Sonic Sensibilities – Sound Cities
Together with three international scholars and three international universities, we are offering in June 2025 an intensive course, funded by the ERASMUS Mobility program:
Participants can learn and practice in two courses in Trondheim, Norway, to deepen understanding of how ecologies of the natural and built environment are shaped by sound and the ways in which sonic sensibilities are articulated.
Teachers are:
Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University, USA Sunniva Hovde, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU) Roger Norum, University of Oulu, Finland Holger Schulze, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
While the first course, Sonic Sensibilities, explores sonic knowledge in classrooms and everyday experiences, the Sound Cities course examines urban ecologies and related possibilities for sustainability. To this end, students will:
• Take part in soundwalks and related performative research practices • Discuss examples of what sound is, what it can do, and related theoretical approaches • Consider how sound informs our understanding of space and place Your experiences and expertise in these areas will inform our design and teaching of the courses.
Each course has a limited capacity of 15 students: first come, first serve.
Information meeting 1 on Zoom: November 22, 2024, 2pmCET Information meeting 2 on Zoom: January 15, 2025, 2pmCET Zoomlink: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/66445654300
Send your application to: erasmussonic@gmail.com Deadline: February 10th, 2025, 2pmCET
In the latest Call for Audio Papers of the peer-reviewed journal SEISMOGRAF, the editors of the special issue SOUND AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS, Stefan Östersjö (Luleå, SE), Bennett Hogg (Newcastle University, UK) and Federico Visi (Luleå, SE), call for papers on topics such as:
interspecies communication, technologies and AI, autoethnographies, climate research, animism, or bioaoustics – all in their sonic form.
Deadline is:
***October 1, 2024***
The full text of the CfP with all details about the format, the audio abstract and the audio paper can be found – right here:
In the early 2000s, groundbreaking articles, edited volumes, and monographs in sound studies were published: by Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past, 2003), Michael Bull and Les Back (Auditory Culture Reader, 2003) and Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch (Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music, 2004), taking up a strand of research that had been developing since the late 1970s, e.g. by Don Ihde (Listening and Voice, 1976), Jacques Attali (Bruits, 1979) or Alain Corbin (Les Cloches de la Terre, 1994).
Since then, Sound Studies has seen a proliferation of research networks and projects, MA programs and postgraduate workshops spring up throughout Western Europe, North America, and more recently, South America, Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, and various African and Middle Eastern countries.
For this rapidly growing scholarly community, it is time to take a moment to review past research, reflect on current practices, and envision the next two and more decades. This conference explores:
1) REIMAGINING HISTORIES: How can research concepts from the early history of sound studies, beginning in the second half of the 20th century, be revisited to shape research in the 21st century?
2) EDITORIAL PRACTICES: How can editorial practices support scholarly writing in the current academic landscape?
3) FUTURE SOUND STUDIES: How do communities of artists, activists, and scholars working with sound shape the future of sound studies?
All five sections of the conference are open to the public, feature keynote addresses as well as on-site panel discussions, and involve early-career scholars from the Nordic countries – also via video call – to manifest sound studies as a global field of research.
The conference is organized by three leading scholars in sound studies: Jennifer Lynn Stoever (Binghamton University, USA). Michael Bull (University of Sussex, UK), and Holger Schulze (KU) – all editors-in-chief of the first-ever Encyclopedia of Sound Studies (Bloomsbury Academic, to be published 2028).
2024-03-13 by Holger Schulze |
Comments Off on Critical Generosity?
“The terms good and bad have no purchase here.” (Dolan 1988: xxxvii)
Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator, 1991, p. xxxvii
Recently, I have been discussing the concept of “critical generosity” with a number of colleagues in the humanities.
After 26 years in this wonderful and rather surprising (and sometimes, I admit, rather tedious) business of writing and reviewing, editing, supervising, and teaching, I wholeheartedly endorse this approach: as a scholarly practice, in teaching, in mentoring, in writing, but also in editing.
Jill Dolan wrote a widely circulated proposal for “critical generosity” in 2013 (revisiting a concept she introduced in her 1991 book The Feminist Spectator as Critic):
