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

All details on the courses and how to apply:

Calling all sonic posthumanists!

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:

SOUND AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS

What is an example of more than human sounds or listening that you are working on or have a fascination with?

The History, Present Practices, and Future Potential of Sound Studies

An International Conference
with Editors and Contributors to
The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies

Sound Studies Lab at the University of Copenhagen, September 18-20, 2024
Organizers: Holger Schulze, Jennifer Lynn Stoever & Michael Bull

Twenty years after sound studies began, this conference looks back and looks to the future.

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 event is open for both onsite and online participation.

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).

Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation  

Programme and registration: https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/sound-studies-lab/calendar/how-to-study-sound/

“The terms good and bad have no purchase here.” (Dolan 1988: 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):

https://public.imaginingamerica.org/blog/article/critical-generosity-2/

And more recently, in 2023, Cathy Hannabach gave a powerful keynote outlining some key principles of this scholarly practice – in relation to editing.

https://ideasonfire.net/editing-as-worldmaking/

Rereading this speech now, I find myself wondering:

How do I, how do you, or how can we try to use some of these key principles of critical generosity in different and varied ways in scholarly work?

“Critical generosity means caring enough to think deeply, act intersectionally, and collaborate interdisciplinarily.” (Hannabach 2023)

References:

Lesley Erin Bartlett (2018), “Performing Critical Generosity in the Feminist Classroom” Feminist Teacher Vol. 28, No. 2-3 (2018), pp. 91-104.

Jill Dolan (1991), The Feminist Spectator as Critic, University of Michigan Press.

Jill Dolan (2013), “Critical Generosity” Public. A Journal of Imagining America: “Linked Fates and Futures” Vol 1, Issue 1+2.

Cathy Hannabach (2023), “Editing as Worldmaking: Critical Generosity in Editorial Practice”, Keynote address, Editorial Freelancers Association conference, Alexandria, VA, August 18, 2023.

David Román (1998), Acts of Intervention. Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS,  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Last year, a great international summer school, organized by a wonderful group of experienced scholars (Maibritt Borgen, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; Jacob Lund, Aarhus University; Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University; Henk Slager, HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht) at BAK – Basis for art and knowledge and at the University of Utrecht, brought together forty scholars and artists from 13 countries and literally every continent. The exchange of ideas, experiences and expertise was impressive and left a deep impression on me and many other participants.

This year I had the pleasure of developing a new summer school course that will take place from August 19-22, 2024, at Copenhagen’s very own ArtHub — in a collaboration between my home university’s new Center for Practice-based Art Studies, the Laboratory for Art Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and our home department, the Department of Arts & Cultural Studies.

Together with some of Denmark’s best scholars in artistic research (Rune Gade, Department for Arts & Cultural Studies; Mikkel Bogh, Center for Practice-based Art Studies; Maibritt Borgen, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts), we have developed this new program under the title: Publishing for Urgency.

In our Call for Participants we write:

Artistic and practice-based research propose situated responses to the urgencies of our current condition – among them, planetary ecological collapse, systemic inequality, and border regimes. Artistic and practice-based research can allow for individuals, communities, and the environment to be imagined otherwise.

How do we, as supervisors, navigate and support these urgencies through and alongside academic structures of dissemination and validation? How can we sustain and develop good practices of publishing artistic and practice-based research that can speak to multiple ways of knowing rather than primarily to the production of knowledge? How can we privilege the many and multi-faceted ways that artistic and practice-based research meets its publics: the research itself as continuous dissemination and engagement, the dissertation, and possibly its defense as an act of publishing, and other frameworks for the dissemination of artistic research. Which approaches, formats, and platforms are recommended and can be developed by supervisors?

This week-long course explores the heterogeneous processes of PhD and postdoc publishing and supervision in the arts.

25 is our maximum number of participants and the registration fee is not more than 250 Euros. This includes lunch on all days and one dinner. A number of scholarships will be available to cover the registration fee.

More details can be found on this page: Supervising Artistic and Practice-based Research: Publishing for Urgency

To apply, please submit a short proposal of no more than 400 words describing a current urgency, development, or possibility that you would like to share with a community of peers along with a 1-page CV to this mail address: pass@hum.ku.dk.

Please make us aware in the application if you wish to apply for a stipend. This will not affect the selection of proposals.

Deadline is:

May 1st, 2024.

Martina Leeker, a longtime scholar in media performance studies with a focus on artistic research, digital cultures, and performance, invited me to a conversation about Art and Research on September 21, 2023. Our conversation is part of her current research project on artistic research, for which she has interviewed scholars and colleagues such as Anke Haarmann, Nishant Shah, and Florian Cramer. Her eight questions and my eight answers are now online in the form of a video interview. The transcript of my answers can be found below.

The video is stored right here, on the Vimeo-platform:

“To move beyond counting, measuring, interpreting.”

1. What is Artistic Research?

Within the field of sound and sensory studies, I would argue that:

all research approaches that employ artistic practices of listening, recording, producing, performing, sensing, experiencing, and communicating can and must be considered artistic research.

More specifically, any research that investigates any research question and does so by working with the aforementioned artistic means is most definitely artistic research.

2. What is the difference between artistic research and research in Natural Sciences and the Humanities?

Artistic research broadens the range of research methods.

I refer here to the Australian artist and art theorist Barbara Bolt: in her understanding of artistic research, this approach is not a new and additional field of research in itself.

On the contrary, it is a research strategy consisting of a potentially infinite number of individual methods; a methodological swarm, so to speak.

In this interpretation, artistic research is positioned alongside, for example, quantitative or qualitative research.

It is therefore neither. It is a research strategy in its own right. It adds a third set of research methods to those two existing ones.

3. What is the added value of artistic research?

Artistic research goes beyond the accepted canon of academic research practices.

These are usually reduced to practices of counting, measuring, interpreting, and arguing. It is a culture of writing as far as the institutionally recognized documents of research are concerned.

Although in everyday practices, on the rather ignored or relegated side of research, all sorts of practices take place: chatting and smoking, consuming caffeine and eating, laughing and dancing, listening and cooking, running, cycling, singing, inventing, imagining, programming, knitting, and a wide range of games, sports, and other activities.

These, however, don’t generally figure as worthy and noble research methods in, say, an academic article or dissertation.

According to institutional rules, these practices are considered non-academic.

So they are on the outside of research.

I think this is a strange and unconvincing, highly selective reduction of what researchers actually do and what actually contributes to a research process.

4. Is there an “existential” necessity, and urgence for artistic research?

Most certainly. The urgency comes from all the realities of research practices I just mentioned.

Younger researchers and artists in particular feel this strange disconnect more and more.

The historically grown and systematically argued system of research methods and strategies seems more and more arbitrary and outdated.

A strange idiosyncrasy, an acquired habit with sometimes rather obsessive features – not a really informed choice.

>>>>IMAGE STILL TAKEN FROM THE VIDEO<<<

5. What is the relevance of artistic research for art education and cultural education?

Education in the present and future can no longer be limited to an assumed core curriculum of reading, counting, measuring, interpreting, and arguing.

This limitation looks more and more ridiculous,

honestly – especially in a habitual culture of media use and all kinds of creations within digital cultures.

Recording practices and listening practices need to be part of cultural and artistic education across the board, fx. the whole range of sensory practices, practices of tasting and movement, of interacting, playing, dancing, singing.

I don’t see why these practices are not crucial to arts education or cultural education.

6. When does artistic research start historically and does it go through changes concerning understanding, concepts or methods since then?

As I understand it, artistic research is as old as the arts: as old as artists being interested in how the world works – and how new crafts and genres, skills and practices can be developed.

On the other hand, it began in a narrower sense, first with the avant-garde’s interest in using and experimenting with research methods within the academy – and then with various countercultural and subcultural movements that have sought to transform and reorganize traditional research institutions since the 1960s.

One could argue that as soon as the parareligious dispositive of writing cultures and the rituals and practices of argumentation were recognized as historical idiosyncrasies and arbitrary choices within science and cultural history, as soon as these traditions were questioned, artistic researchers began to add and inoculate their home institutions with this surprisingly radical and open strand of research methods.

7. Is there a relationship between artistic research and digital cultures?

Hm. Tricky question. Both fields have developed together over a long period of time.

But from my perspective, a decidedly post-digital perspective (in the sense of Florian Cramer), I would argue that artistic research can of course take place within and through the means and tools and technologies of digital cultures.

In fact, it often does, because digital cultures and their practices and apparatuses make it so much easier or even merely possible to record, store, transport, edit, share, and republish all artifacts that are not just static text in a sequence of words.

Digital cultures support artistic research, so to speak. But their support is not a necessary condition for doing artistic research.

Especially within sonic artistic research, there are many performances, listening practices, performing practices that do clearly not come from digital cultures, nor do they require any apparatuses or practices related to them.

In some cases, they even reject all of the existing digital means of production altogether.

8. What is the future of artistic research?

My hope is that:

artistic research will be recognized more and more in universities as a research strategy.

It is already more and more recognized, in various European countries, within art academies, for example in Scotland, in the Netherlands, also in Finland.

But only when it is recognized within the more traditional, academic institutions, it seems to me that it will indeed achieve its most noble goal;

which is:

to provide methods, forms of presentation, forms of publication, and a whole swarm of discourses and discussions that transcend the writing cultures and the alphanumeric form of communication that are at the core of institutionalized academic work in general.

To move beyond counting, measuring, interpreting, and arguing – and into listening and sensing, tasting, eating, or dancing as recognized and legitimate research methods.

How to explore an archive that consists mainly of tape recordings?

On Wednesday, November 22, kl.17, you have the opportunity to join Magnus Kaslov, head of Dansk Lydarkeologi and PhD researcher here, at the University of Copenhagen, when he unboxes with us and for us the sound archive of the Statens Museum for Kunst:

UNBOXING#1 at Statens Museum for Kunst:

Wednesday, November 22, 2023, at kl.17.

Currently, Kaslov works on the archive at SMK that contains around 200 tapes, including interviews as well as slides, manuscripts, scores that were collected by Danish artist William Louis Sørensen (1942-2005).

The aural and sensory unboxing will take place at SMK, in a small cinema space, right in the basement by the wardrobe.

If you wish to join, please register for this unboxing right here:

UNBOXING#1

Vi ses på onsdag 22/11?

A line touching a circle at only one point is called a tangent. Such a punctual, momentary, and passing encounter constitutes a decisive, formative relationship which differs substantially from the now proverbial existential entanglement or embodiment.

Seeking to rethink relationality today, we want to trace tangential relations in art, design, literature, music and sound art, and the performing arts.

Tangentiality accounts for potentially ongoing approximate interactions (as in calculus) as well as for separation, transitoriness, loss and finitude (as in “divergent, erratic”). As a concept, it allows us to think relations of a unique kind: a coexistence of beings and things in the world as tangential rather than entangled does not deny the interdependence between human and nonhuman entities. At the same time, tangential relations leave entities as separated as they are connected. This ambiguity of touch and let go, of being together-apart, allows space for autonomy, singularity, discreteness, individual freedom.

For us, Stefanie Heine and Holger Schulze, the concept of tangentiality offers a welcome refinement of the broad and often inaccurate use of notions of entanglement to describe and interpret all sorts of relationships with entities, beings and things in this world. While entanglement (e.g. Barad) and the related concept of kinship (e.g. Haraway) promote an intensive and all-encompassing condition, implying even some sort of genealogical effect on the person, the concept of tangentiality allows to focus more on punctual, highly serendipitous or even erratic and completely inconsistent effects. This relation is neither ontological nor existential; it creates bonds of cohesion that can be strong or frail, might last or be cut.

A tangential relation exists when a tool or piece of hardware is infrequently used, yet retains a crucial importance in one’s life. It prevails when a certain space or landscape is only encountered rarely, at certain times, but these encounters still play an important role in the life of this traveler. When we momentarily collide with something unknown, unfamiliar, which unsettles us and leaves an impact, in passing. Even if the encounter with a work of art, a piece of music, or a literary text is merely incidental, it can constitute a crucial relation. Needless to say, interpersonal or interspecies relations can also take the form of tangentiality. What about a tangential relation to the ecosystems we are involved in—a potentially less intrusive, less appropriative engagement with nature, which sometimes might best be left alone?

With this Call for Paper, we invite you to think with us, to experiment with us, to make a taste test:

How can you use such a concept of tangentiality in your field of research? How might it support you in exploring, questioning, articulating particularly punctual, fleeting, or transitory relationships? How may it help you think a notion of ongoingness marked by discontinuity, or a notion of autonomy that is compatible with co-dependence? How might your research and academic discussions you are participating in be transformed, developed, and made more precise if the concept of tangentiality were to enter it?

You find the full text of our Call for Paper, with more background and relevant sources, right here:

Abstract length: 400 words maximum (excluding bibliography)
Deadline: ***Friday, December 8, 2023***
Conference dates: Wednesday and Thursday, October 16 & 17, 2024

In a week’s time, on Monday, October 9, kl.14-16 I would like to invite you to a slow and deep and meticulous conversation on listening and sounding – organized by one of our students at the University of Cpenhagen, Lukas Lund:

a Listening Seminar.

Invited by Lukas Lund and his Bureau for Listening, the composer Jesper Norda, the researcher and director of the Slow Research Lab, Carolyn F. Strauss, as well as yours truly will meet at kl.14 for a Listening Seminar at Bådehuset, right on Refshaløen, a quiet 5 minute walk from Copenhagen Contemporary – to inquire and wonder together about listening.

I will to ask:

Who listens in what way?

How and why do you sound?

What role could or did or will sound play in our or others’ lives, past or future?

How might you and I listen to this – and to potential future sound events?

In addition, two days earlier, on Saturday, October 7, between kl.8.00 and kl.20.25, you have the opportunity to listen to Jesper Norda‘s composition The Goldberg Variation (Bach Clock) – for one, two or more pianists from 2012 at the same place as our conversation, at Bådehuset right by Refshaløen.

Listen with us – will you?

En kort introduktion til lydantropologi – som svar på nogle spørgsmål, jeg blev stillet i et kort interview til DR, i anledning af lydinstallationen “Soundwaves” i Aa Kirke på Bornholm.

Interviewet kan høres i den tredje time af radioprogrammet – i denne lydfil fra 21. september 2023, lige efter Westlife, med tidskoden 02:36.42:

https://www.dr.dk/lyd/p4bornholm/p4-morgen-bornholm/p4-morgen-bornholm-2023/p4-morgen-14902320384

Du kan finde den fulde tekst af interviewet nedenfor:

DR: Hvordan sanser vi lyd?

HS: Lyd er først og fremmest en fysisk begivenhed – før jeg hører en lyd gennem mine ører og i min hjerne, oplever jeg den i min krop. Derefter reagerer vi meget direkte. Vi gynger, min arm vibrerer, jeg mærker reaktioner i min mave, i min nakke eller på mine fodsåler. At opleve lyd er derfor altid noget, der sker uafbrudt. Først når vi er kolde og døde, finder den fysiske lydoplevelse ikke længere sted.

DR: Hvad kan lyd og rum gøre ved os?

HS: Det rum, jeg befinder mig i, er faktisk den allerførste forstærker til alle slags lyde. Lyd uden rum er derfor svært at forestille sig. Et rum skaber lyden, så at sige. Det bliver meget tydeligt, når musikere eller sangere rent faktisk skal lytte og synge sig ind i et koncertrum.

Men også når vi befinder os nye steder, sammen med venner, på et hotelværelse eller en ny arbejdsplads, har vi nogle gange brug for meget tid til at vænne os til disse nye, mange små lyde:

Hvilken vejtrafik hører jeg? Hvor høj er varmen eller klimaanlægget? Hvilke lyde hører jeg fra naboerne?

DR: Påvirker forskellige lyd og rum vores sindstilstand? Hvilken betydning har forskellige rum for musik og lyd, og hvilken betydning har forskellig(e) lyd(e) for forskellige rum?

HS: Effekten af et lydrum er ikke kun begrænset til hørelsen! For det er ikke kun lydene som sådan, der har en effekt på os. ALLE lyde er ALTID tæt sammensmeltet med dufte og berøringer, smage og bevægelser.

I en skov hører jeg for eksempel også de andre luftsammensætninger, så at sige; i et supermarked mærker jeg også de andres indkøbsstress; i en bil hører jeg motor og benzin, fart og tekniske apparater.

Hvert øjeblik, hvor jeg hører, er forbundet med utallige andre sanseindtryk.

Og når jeg hører en yndlingssang igen, hører jeg ikke kun disse toner og harmonier: jeg hører frem for alt de situationer, hvor jeg hørte den før: en koncertsal, et dansegulv, forelskelse, sorg, håb, som jeg oplevede personligt i et bestemt øjeblik.

Lydhukommelse er situationshukommelse.

DR: Hvordan kan den almene lytter derude bruge lyd og sine sanser i hverdagen på en god måde?

HS: Hvis jeg forlader et ret bemærkelsesværdigt designet rum, som en kirke, bærer jeg stadig denne opmærksomhed på rum og lyd med mig. Når jeg så vender tilbage til nogle hverdagsrum, som et supermarked, min bil eller min lejlighed, lytter jeg stadig til alt, hvad der sker der, med en lignende, detaljeret opmærksomhed.

Så opdager jeg måske nye eller ofte ignorerede lyde eller begivenheder – som måske har været til stede hele tiden. Grunden til dette er følgende:

Lydene bliver i vores kroppe. Selv timer og dage, selv år efter, at jeg har hørt noget, kan jeg pludselig huske det: og i det øjeblik bliver jeg transporteret tilbage til det øjeblik.

Alle mine oplevelser, også stemninger og smerter og ønsker vender tilbage.

Som krop optager jeg lyde hele tiden.