Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies

Holger Schulze
Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies

»Transmission
trumps listening,

we are no good
at receiving.«

Michel Serres, The Five Senses (1985/2008), S. 139

Be it sound art-pieces, academic articles, blogposts or a PhD-treatment, an artistic research proposal: in this biweekly research colloquium we immerse ourselves in discussing new approaches to sound studies.

Part of the interdisciplinary ressearch environment of the Sound Studies Lab we invite all researchers, artists, students or listeners to take part and to propose topics and materials for our future meetings.

As a collaborative thinking workshop this meeting provides an opportunity for researchers of all levels (experienced scholars as well as PhD-/MA-students or artistic researchers) to discuss their approaches from various interdisciplinary fields with a special sensibility concerning sound.

Time

biweekly on Zoom

3:15pm-4:30pm

Location

On Zoom (see below)

 

Department of Arts & Cultural Studies
Københavns Universitet
Karin Blixens Vej 1
2300 København

References

Cf. on website Sound in Media Culture

Programme

 

* Tuesday February 11th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: The Voice “in Action”: The Phenomenon of the Poetic Voice and Its Agency in Contemporary (Polish) Poetry from the Perspective of Sound Studies
Presenter: Katarzyna Ciemiera (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, PL)

Abstract: The development of sound studies at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has contributed to the intensification of comparative research on the phenomenon of the poetic voice in intermedial contexts. However, there is still a lack of analyses that would precisely apply the methodologies and theoretical approaches to sound from the field of sound studies to the exploration of the poetic voice. This issue primarily concerns the question of the political agency of the voice, which appears to be crucial to sound studies. From a sound perspective, the subversive potential of the voice lies in its ability to dismantle dualistic oppositions and the patterns of political representation that rely on them. However, contemporary literary studies (as well as Western culture) restrict this agency to the referential functions of the voice/the medium of speech, which is evident, for example, in literary practices that equate the political, poetic voice with the performative recitation of politically charged poems. The presentation will aim to reflect on the possibilities of exploring the political potential of the poetic voice from the perspective of sound studies, using examples from the latest Polish engaged poetry. The paper will discuss three situations in which the poetic voice proves to be effective not because of its referential functions (the transmission of a political message), but because of its ability to disrupt the transfer of meanings resulting from the textual logic of the poem. The first situation concerns the “bad reading strategy” characterized by the poet’s nonchalant pronunciation, articulation, and intonation errors, etc., which hinder effective communication of the content. The second refers to “ironic vocal realizations” that are disproportionate to the rhetoric of the written poem (e.g., articulating an engaged poem with a subtle voice). The third relates to unintended moments where “the voice acts like litmus paper” i.e., reveals the true potential of the given engaged message (for example, through the poet’s difficulties in vocally delivering the poem).






* Tuesday February 25th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: Voices as Relations
Presenter: Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, SWE)

Abstract: The emergence of new voice technologies, machine listening techniques, and voice cloning services raises a number of ethical and political concerns across private and public realms. As voice has historically and cross-culturally been perceived as an expression of the self, deeply situated at the core of being a human being, serious existential challenges arise in this respect too. Where should we search for and locate the self, the beholder of voice, in techno-cultures increasingly populated by computationally generated, disembodied voices?

Rather than seeking the essence of voice as a phenomenon that can be attributed to a single subject, this presentation embarks on a journey to understand voice as inherently a relational event. I suggest that current developments at the intersection of voice and AI do not necessarily jeopardize voice—or at least, they do not only do so—but also remind us that voices are both shaped by and embedded within larger, thicker, and temporally extended ecologies.

Therefore, instead of succumbing to the acousmatic aura and eeriness evoked by seemingly disembodied artificial voices, I propose viewing them as components of a larger “acousmatrix”: a dense field of relations spanning various subjects, materialities, and histories. Critically inclined artistic practices, as I will argue, can help uncover this intricate mesh of relations while simultaneously pointing toward alternative, more just, and perhaps more hopeful configurations of these dynamics.






* Tuesday March 11th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: Auditory Asides: Listening Habits and Non-Linear Temporalities
Presenter: Malcom Troon (University of Sussex, UK)

Abstract: I will present new ideas regarding sonic cognition by challenging traditional notions of exclusively singular and linear sonic chronologies. I will examine auditors’ listening habits when organising their sonic environs. My research has investigated the sonic as a property of permanence, opposing tendencies to consider sounds as being ephemeral and brief. As such, through observing subjects (and myself) within sonic environments, this research has unearthed the notion of the ‘auditory aside.’

The auditory aside is a cognitive process. Whereby a listener extracts a sound event from their ongoing sound environment, pausing it while examining the sounds that surround it both temporally and spatially. That sound event is stored as a received, but often pre-cognised auditory event. This process places a sound or sounds aside, retained in dormancy, until required or ready for cognition. Once more sonic information has been collected, and its contextual meaning has been perceived, it is reintegrated back into the wider sonic picture. This time as an understood and cognised sonic property. This process spotlights that we perceive not one singular linear sonic sequence, but parallel and even prismatic sonic timelines if you will. This subsequently raises questions regarding notions of the past, present and future, and their function within sonic realms when considering the sideward, backward, and prismatic glancing processes of the auditory aside.

My presentation will go on to examine three examples of my research participants’ sonic environments as examples to describe the practice of the auditory aside. I will document visits to Great Dixter Gardens, Sussex for its multi-layered dawn chorus, examine ferry journeys across Istanbul’s Bosporus Strait for its daytime sonic cacophony and the mountains of Rum in Scotland for the sonically intense and daily nocturnal arrival of thousands of Manx Shearwater seabirds. These examples will unearth sonic chronologies as being unbound by strict linear temporality. Furthermore, by examining findings that we do not necessarily cognise sounds in the chronological order at which temporally arrive at the ear, I have found that auditor event organisation occurs prismatically and as such, the flow and order of sonic perceptions seldom match the flow of time on which they are transported and received.






* Tuesday March 25th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: Sound Studies and Sonic Methodologies in Russia since the 2010s
Presenter: Maksim Zhiganov

Abstract: Research on the history of sound and music studies in the post-Soviet space is still more a common place in the “discourse of scarcity” and “litany of lagging behind” from the world scientific process than a field of historical and epistemological orientation. Nevertheless, this compact but rapidly developing history shows us unexpected types of connection and continuity with Soviet acoustical and musicological science, which in its different periods, depending on the tasks set externally, directed its efforts unevenly to different aspects of the sonic and musical. In my presentation, I will start from the thesis that the Russian acoustic turn of the last 10-15 years performs several overlapping functions: by distracting the authorities from the ideology of political and social research, it becomes a politics in itself, realizing one of the few opportunities to speak the language of critical theory or to address fundamental issues of current socio-humanitarian theories on the rights of neutrality and legitimacy.






* Tuesday April 8th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: Endangered Sounds: Participatory podcast and immersive mixing for political resistance in internal areas
Presenter: Dario Galleana (University of Turin, IT)

Abstract: The urgent matter of internal areas — rural regions isolated from basic services — fractures Europe into two competing soundscapes: the loud mediatised cities and the silent disconnected villages (Scanu et al. 2020). However, sociology, political science and geography focus on macro policies and ignore the people’s living voices (Carrosio 2019; De Rossi 2020; Meloni 2015; Rossi-Doria and Gorgoni 2005; Tantillo 2023; Vitale 2024). As a result, broad analyses neglect local struggles to redefine internal areas (Palmieri 2023). My work addresses internal areas with special attention to voice and the role of sound technology in participatory action research (Hilder 2023; Stoecker and Falcón 2023; Van Der Vaart, Van Hoven, and Huigen 2018). Specifically, “Endangered Sounds” is a participatory podcast that challenges the city-countryside dichotomy and unearths the liveliness of the Alpine village of Cevo, Italy. Using immersive mixing techniques, the voices of Cevo merge with their soundscapes, creating an archive of the community’s sounds. QR codes throughout the village share the podcast with travellers. I argue that the participatory podcast (Barbarino, Herlo, and Bergmann 2022; Smith et al. 2021; Wilson 2018) is a tool for political resistance and critical consciousness (Freire 2021; Hofman 2020), and that immersiveness emphasises the authors’ positionality within the territory and exposes the power dynamics of audio technology. In conclusion, this project gives a new voice to the neglected soundscapes of internal areas by using the participatory podcast and immersive sound as tools for political resistance and the preservation of marginalised sonic cultures.






* Tuesday May 6th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: Sonic Probing: An Artistic Research Practice
Presenter: Robert Willim Robert Willim (Lund University, SWE)

Abstract: I will take the point of departure in the live-improvised performance Fields of Unknowing, and how it was performed at the Intonal festival in 2024. I will briefly present the concept behind the performance and how it relates to my research and the method called probing. I won’t be able to present the whole 30 min. performance during the meeting. But if you who will participate want to check out a recording of the performance beforehand at this link:

In Fields of Unknowing, rough and mesmeric sonic worlds are evoked in a live improvised set that mixes storytelling with electronic soundscapes. It is based on simple waveforms, sounds from site-specific recordings, of electro-magnetic fields and meandering feedback loops. These sounds are mixed with manipulated vocals and storytelling. It encourages the listener to simultaneously drift away and to meditate on the role of emerging technologies that gradually are made paradoxically both banal and uncanny. Through performances such as Fields of Unknowing, I mix sound with storytelling to explore imaginaries, technologies, and our relations to the incomprehensible. Fields of Unknowing is related to the concept Mundania.






* Tuesday May 20th, 2025, kl.15:15-16:30 CET:

Link: https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/65488389742

Topic: European Dance Music Cultures and Sound
Presenter: Jack McNeill (University of York, UK)

Abstract: In recent years, the discourse in the growing field of Dance Music Cultures (DMCs) has primarily centred around musical, social and/or historical aspects of the field.
Building upon the work of a small, but significant and growing body of work that considers DMCs from a more theoretical perspective, this presentation will consider
the role that sound has to play in European DMCs from a Sound Studies perspective: how might sound technologies and architectural spaces be indicative of a culture’s sonic ecology? What further work can be done to define the ‘sound’ of a city? And what role do voices play in the generation, sustainability, and sometimes disintegration of DMCs?

Feeding into a larger research project on the role of sound in DMCs, this presentation will provide a broad overview of the sonic structures in the field. Sound systems and architectural spaces are key technologies for the delivery and experience of dance music, but as structures they also hold significant meaning. For example, London’s Soundsystem Culture provides a narrative device to describe the city’s rich migrant history, as well as feeding into its multifaceted contemporary DIY scene. Concomitantly, the former brownfield sites upon which Berlin’s club scene
was built has greatly influenced its sonic identity. But in the face of ongoing gentrification, an increasingly neo-liberal club culture, and a rise in political conservativism, how are the sonic ecologies of these cities morphing? Subsequently, the notion of voice, discussed broadly in sound Studies, might help to understand complex power dynamics between localised DMCs, city residents, and institutional infrastructures (local and national government, for example). Moreover, the notion of voice, more accurately defined in German as ‘Mitspracherecht’, might be a useful analytical tool in understand how some communities’ voices within DMCs might be amplified or silenced.