audio cultures:

 

sounding out cultural studies

 

 

on this page

 

 

 

ISEA 2009 exhibition and panel discussion

 

The audio_cultures seminar organises 'sound - space - network: exhibition and panel discussion' to dinvestigate what role does sound plays in the informational society, as a strategy to convey information, produce experiences of place, and illicit new interpersonal behaviours. More info here...

 

about audio cultures

 

The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media facilitates and fosters new dialogues across disciplinary formations, institutional settings, art forms and media. A seminar around ‘audio cultures’ will start in November 2008.

 

This is a platform for the exploration of a number of concerns and issues related to the audio cultures and sonic environments and forms of modernity and is a point of departure for a discourse which engages concerns and issues that have emerged from the recent scholarship from composers, philosophers, cultural theorists and historians spanning such themes as the body, technology, philosophy and aesthetics, architecture and environments, memory, history and the archive. These include phenomenological, anthropological and sociological studies of sound, music and the listening subject, cultural histories of sound reproduction, a history of the senses, philosophical reflections on the ear, musical form and aesthetics and material from a wide number of sources across a diversity of disciplinary formations. Some questions and themes for consideration: does history have a sound and what does the past sound like? ; listening in and to the archive; what does architecture sound like?; the ear as prosthesis, sound as materiality and the materiality of sound; is there an ethics to listening ? how does sound work in the process of subjectivisation?; aural epistemologies, acoustic ecology and the ethnographic ear; the radio apparatus, practices and forms; audio‐spectrality and reproduction.

 

suggested readings

 

Adorno, T.W. 2002. Essays on Music. Berkeley: California
Attali, J. 1985 Noise: The political economy of music. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press.
Blesser, B. and Salter L.R. 2006. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural
Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Bull, M. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge
Bull, M. and Back, L. 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader Oxford. New York: Berg.
Corbin, A. 1999. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside.
London: Macmillan
Cox, C. and Warner, D. 2004. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum
Erlmann, V. (ed.) 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity. Oxford,
New York: Berg.
Hegarty, P. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. London: Continuum
Idhe, D. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. New York: SUNY
Kahn, D. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
(ed.) 1992. Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT
LaBelle, B. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum
Nancy, J.L. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham
Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction Durham, N.C.:
Duke
Szendy, P. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham
Weiss, A.S. (ed.) 2001. Experimental Sound and Radio New York, Cambridge: NYU, MIT

 

spring semester 2009

 

A seminar series rooted in a sustained interdisciplinary analysis contemporary audio cultures.

 

  • Friday January 30th 2009 16:00-18:00
    Introduction to Michael Bull's "Sound Moves: Ipod Culture and Urban Experience" (2007)
    and Jonathan Sterne's "The MP3 as cultural artifact" (2006).
    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings


  • Friday February 13th 2009 16:00-18:00

    Carter, Paul (2004) "Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space"
    from Veit Erlmann (ed.) Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity London: Berg, pp43-64

    Corbin, Alain (2003) "The Auditory Markers of the Village" in Bull and Back
    (eds.) The Auditory Culture Reader, London: Berg, pp117-26


    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings


  • Friday March 6th 2009 16:00-18:00

    (Rescheduled from February 27th)

    "The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns 1900-40" from Bull and Back (eds.) The Auditory Culture Reader, pp. 165-90

    Ureta, Sebastian (2007) 'Noise and the Battles for Space: Mediated Noise and Everyday Life in a Social Housing Estate in Santiago, Chile', Journal of Urban Technology, 14:3, pp. 103 — 130

    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings



    Interesting link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNyCAJXUXE

    Reference to performer - Jérôme Noetinger - made during discussion can be seen/heard doing his stuff here:

    Jérôme Noetinger Link #1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfEKLUgUlAk

    Jérôme Noetinger Link #2 - http://dailymotion.virgilio.it/video/x10blb_mov03508_music

  • Friday March 20th 2009 16:00-18:00

    Smith, Nicholas J. (2001) Why Hardcore Goes Soft: Adorno, Japanese Noise, and the Extirpation of Dissonance* Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring.

    See also: Ben Watson on "Music, Violence, Truth"

    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings


  • Friday April 3rd 2009 16:00-18:00



    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings


  • Friday April 17th 2009 16:00-18:00

    This week's readings are taken from Cox, C. and Warner, D. (2004) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum.

    Reynolds, Simon (2004) 'Noise', Audio Culture, pp. 55 — 58

    Russo, Mary and Warner, Danile (2004) 'Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands', Audio Culture, pp. 47 — 54

    Schafer, R. Murray (2004) 'The Music of the Environment', Audio Culture, pp. 29 — 39

    Slouka, Mark (2004) 'Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life', Audio Culture, pp. 40 — 46

    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings


  • Friday May 1st 2009 all day

    earful @project



    This is a special public event co-organised by the audio-culture seminar group and provides an opportunity to investigate aspects of listening together. Full details here.
    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie if you are interested in participating


  • Friday 15th May 2009 16:00-18:00

    1. A review and reflection on the Listening Event. Feedback was generally good but I am keen to hear what and how it can be learned from into the future around the planning and organisation publicity and content, etc of the whole event. The 'how' and the 'what' are just as important here. This should all point to the ambitions of the seminar and what it is for and about too.

    2. ISEA platform

    This,like the recent earful event is an opportunity to do / make / show / tell / this time to a more specific audience.

    3. The future of the Seminar

    At the Graduate School level, we are planning for the next twelve to eighteen months and are keen to further evolve the seminars as a core aspect of our activities. What we are interested to know is where is this going and what is going to do. This question is being asked at all of the seminars at this time before the summer arrives and I would expect the seminar to run up until the end of June at least. Does it remain a general audio cultures seminar or are there specific themes questions and topics that we need to address? We need to collectively decide this and organise accordingly.

 

autumn semester 2008

 

 

  • Friday November 7th 2008 2:30 pm
    To launch the audio cultures seminar, GradCAM invites you to a lecture by Ole Reitov of Freemuse in GradCAM on the 7th of November at 2.30pm. This will be followed by a meeting to initiate the audio cultures seminar for all interested parties.This is the first meetingof this seminar group to establish its modus operandi and terms of reference.

    This event will address issues of music censorship seen in perspective to religion, culture, gender, politics and musicology; raising time perspectives from Plato to the current day and addressing censorship through its relationship to ethnicity. It will be of specific interest to researchers active in creative arts and media, popular and auditory cultures. Please contact Aidan Mc Elwaine to register your interest to attend at + 353 (0)1 6361181 or aidan.mcelwaine@gradcam.ie


  • Friday November 21st 2008 4:00 pm
    Frederic Jameson 'Introduction' to Jacques Attali's Noise and Chapter 1 'Listening'
    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings
    or click here for reading 1 and here for reading 2 (password required)

  • Friday December 5th 2008 13:00 -18:00
    Noise / Silence NIVAl Symposium at NCAD: A Speaking Matters Event.

  • Friday December 12th 2008 4:00 pm
    reading 3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1958) [orig. 1945] The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, Routledge. pp. 248-267
    reading 4 Sterne, Jonathan (2002) The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Duke UP, Raleigh, pp51-67
    reading 5 Stankievech, Charles (2007) 'From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity', LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 17, pp. 55–59, 2007
    Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie for the readings(password required)

 

 

 

 

For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.