Tag Archive | Jonathan Sterne

Sound at ASA 2012

ASA Caucus Flyer

This year, #ASA2012 is being held in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Puerto Rico Convention Center from November 15-18.  San Juan provides a historic opportunity for the interdisciplinary scholars working under the banner of “American Studies” to ponder the theme, “Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future,” from a site that has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States since it was seized from Spain (its former imperial occupiers) after the Spanish American War in 1898.  According to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Insular Cases an “unincorporated territory” is “a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.” Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, despite not having voting representatives in Washington D.C. and being unable to vote in mainland presidential elections.  Just a few days ago, Puerto Ricans voted on yet another referendum to become a state—there have been 3 such votes, one in 1967, 1993, and 1998, but this is the first where statehood won a majority of the votes—an issue that both U.S. presidential candidates were all but silent on in their recent campaigns.  This vote suggests a sea change in Puerto Rican-U.S. relations–what an exciting time to hold ASA in San Juan!–and I’d also like to think this particular meeting portends an exciting shift in sound studies as well.

For one thing, sound studies scholars in particular will be discussing power and imperialism loudly and clearly at this meeting. Sounding Out!’s Managing Editor, Liana Silva, will be participating in a roundtable at 8:00 a.m Sunday morning entitled “Doing Disciplinarity: Puerto Rican Studies is/as/with American Studies” where she, along with Marta S. Rivera Monclova (Framingham State College), Leonardo L. Flores Feliciano (University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez), and Sara Poggio (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) will discuss the fraught relationship between the two fields of study, particularly in relation to America’s imperial history.

And then, the fully signed-sealed-and delivered ASA Sound Studies Caucus hosts two official panels that explicitly consider the politics of sound and listening.  The first is on on Friday from 4:00-5:45: Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire” chaired by Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas) and featuring the research of Marci McMahon (University of Texas, Pan American), Genevieve Yue (University of Southern California and yours truly, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (SUNY Binghamton); and the second on Saturday from 4:00-5:45: “Sound and the State: The Politics of Acoustic Power” chaired by Jonathan Sterne (McGill University) and featuring the research of David Suisman (University of Delaware) and Peter Tschirhart (University of Virginia) with a comment by Mara Mills (New York University).   From the racial dynamics of postwar New York City’s noise laws to “Noise Exposure Maps,” Sonic Booms to the technics of female silence, ASA’s sound studies scholars continue the sociopolitical interventions of last year’s “Sound Clash: Listening to America Studies” special issue of American Quarterly.  This issue, edited by Josh Kun and Kara Keeling, explicitly focused on issues of race, gender, class sexuality, and nation (by the way, if you misplaced your copy, Johns Hopkins press has just released the issue in book volume form).

The Sound Studies Caucus also continues its very important organizational role this year by bringing scholars together for its second annual Sound Studies Caucus Meet-and-Greet, which will be co-hosted by none other than Sounding Out! !!! We have been thrilled to work with co-organizers Inés Casillas (UCSB), Roshanak Kheshti (UCSD) and Deb Vargas (UCR) to plan a get together at the District Bar of the nearby Sheraton (200 Convention Way, 787-993-3500, Map) where we will solicit volunteers and chat about the activities of the caucus this year and next.  Sounding Out! will be officially welcoming the members of its new advisory board at the meet-and-greet, as well as sharing details about current and future Calls for Posts, and pumping up the crowd for what’s ahead in the blog for 2013.  If you are in San Juan for the conference, please join us!

“Grupo Mania and My Puerto Rican Flag,” by Flickr User Photo Prodigy

Overall, while sound studies work is somewhat lighter than in years past—a trend I also noted at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting earlier this year—the research on sound, listening, and aurality at this year’s #ASA2012 is, more than ever before, focused on questions of race, gender, and sexuality in ways that, as Keeling and Kun stated in their introduction to Sound Clash: “can enable an interdisciplinary American studies in which knowledges and insights that have not been perceptible to our dominant intellectual paradigms might be heard or heard anew” (453).  I am particularly enthused about what promises to be excellent new research in African American Studies—especially the panels “Ask Your Mama: The Sound(ed) Poetics and Politics of Black Feminist Internationalism” (Saturday, 12:00-1:45) andBlackness and the Sacred Performative” (Thursday 4:00-5:45, featuring SO! writer Ashon Crawley [Duke]—and Chican@/Latino Studies—notably roundtables on The Talking Cure for Empire? Oral History and Testimonio in the Twenty-first Century” (Friday, 10:00-11:45) and “Subjectivity and Sound: Rethinking Genre in Chicano/a Music” (Friday, 2:00-3:45).  There are also multiple panels that elicit transnational conversations about audio culture—Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire” (Friday 4:00-5:45) and “Jazz and the Voices of Empire and Resistance” in particular (Saturday, 10:00-11:45)—and enable transmedia comparisons—especially “Terrains of Modernity, Aural Research, and Critique” (Sunday, 2:00-3:45).

Whereas the downturn in sound studies work at SCMS 2012 was due primarily to a scheduling snafu—doublebooked with the 2012 EMP—I think the ASA’s is perhaps due to the beginnings of a sea change (a new wave?)  in sound studies.  It is certainly not attributable to a lack of interest or scholarship—the emails I get for Sounding Out! alone can attest to growing numbers of truly enthusiastic scholars working on sound and listening—therefore, I put forth that sound studies is entering a moment of reflection. It is no longer enough to breathlessly sound out new sonic terrain; we are moving beyond the period when sound alone could be the binding theme in a conference panel.  The work is getting more nuanced, robust sub-fields are developing—voice studies, for example—vocabularies are becoming shared, and more than ever, scholars are engaging with each other’s work on a deeper level, complicating and texturing the just-established histories, narratives, and canons of the field. Whereas Michele Hilmes’s foundational 2005 review essay in American Quarterly “Is there a Thing Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does it Matter?” noted that “various venues of academic work on sound phenomena so rarely speak to or take heed of each other” (252), I noted no fewer than twelve sound-related roundtables at #ASA2012 where scholars will be doing the difficult-but-rewarding work of acknowledging conflicts, hashing out shared interests, and forging what comes next.  Please take good notes, sound studies folks, because ASA has enacted an official ban on recording:

The papers and commentaries presented during this meeting are intended solely for the hearing of those present and should not be tape-recorded, copied, or otherwise reproduced without the consent of the authors. Recording, copying, or reproducing a paper/presentation without the consent of the author(s) may be a violation of common law copyright and may result in legal difficulties for the person recording, copying, or reproducing (ASA Program PDF, 17).

Unfortunately, this means that the 2012 sound roundtables will be one-time-only, be-there-or-be-square affairs.  But as we know from so much research in our vibrant field, even while the vocal grains and tones will fade away into the air of San Juan, these unscripted scholarly performances can’t help but have lasting reverberations.

The Liner Notes for the ASA Sound Studies Caucus “Cassette” Flyer.  This and Featured Image by Frank Bridges, fbridges@eden.rutgers.edu

Scroll down for the sound-related conference listings.  For the virtual experience, look for my live tweets via our Facebook and Twitter pages, Liana Silva’s live tweets (@literarychica) or on the official ASA backchannel: #ASA2012. Please comment to let SO! know what you think–both before and after ASA 2012.  Finally, If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: jsa@soundingoutblog.com

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2011-2012).

Jump to THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
Jump to FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012
Jump to SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012
Jump to SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012

THURSDAY, November 15, 2012

10:00 am – 11:45 am

 

007. Crimson and Clover: Hope and Dread in the Musical Countercultures of the 1960s

 Puerto Rico Convention Center 102C

CHAIR:  Eric Avila, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

PAPERS: Rachel Rubin, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA), “I Think That Maybe I’m Dreaming: Music, Counterculture, and the Renaissance Pleasure Faire”

Andrew Green Hannon, Yale University (CT), “Huey Digs Bob Dylan: The Black Panthers, Highway 61 Revisited, and Making Revolutionary Meaning”

Jeffrey Melnick, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA), “The Ballad of Terry Melcher: Famous and Rising Sons in the LA Counterculture”

Will Spires, Santa Rosa Junior College (CA), “The Musical Holdouts of Colby Street: Formation and Legacy of an Old Time Music Community”

COMMENT:  Eric Avila, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Shane Vogel, Indiana University–Bloomington (IN), “Being a Fad: Black Performance and the Calypso Craze,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A

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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

031. Invisible Structures and the Experience of Music

 Puerto Rico Convention Center 103B

 CHAIR:  Lisa Brawley, Vassar College (NY)

PAPERS: Carlo Rotella, Boston College (MA), “The Home of the Blues”

Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama, Birmingham (AL), “Structuring the Eclectic: Radio and Entertainment Formats (Not Genres)”

 Hua Hsu, Vassar College (NY), “Sounds of Confusion: H. T. Tsiang and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Protest Music”

COMMENT:  Lisa Brawley, Vassar College (NY)

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 037. Blogging as Public Pedagogy: A Roundtable with GayProf, Historiann, Roxie, and Tenured Radical

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202B

CHAIR:  Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)

PANELISTS:  Marilee Lindemann, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)

Ann Little, Colorado State University (CO)

 Anthony Mora, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)

Claire Bond Potter, New School University (NY)

Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)

 

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Jack Hamilton, Harvard University (MA), “House Burning Down: Jimi Hendrix, Race, and the Limits of Sixties Music,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, University of Pennsylvania (PA), “Feeling Colors and Seeing Speech: Black Women’s Choreopoetic Diasporas of Difference,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209C

 

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Nadja Millner-Larsen, “Black Synaesthesia: The Anarcho-Aesthetics of Black Mask,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B

Mary Beltrán, University of Texas, Austin (TX), “Blacking Up for Laughs: Televisual Blackface and ‘Post-Racial’ Cultural Memory,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 208B

 

 4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

 077. Blackness and the Sacred Performative

 Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A

CHAIR:  Michelle D. Commander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (TN)

PAPERS: Amey Victoria Adkins, Duke University (NC), “‘Ain’t I A Woman’: Black Madonnas, Mammys, and the Performative Aesthetics of Darkness”

 Ashon Crawley, Duke University (NC), “Breathing Towards Lynching Critique: Whooping in Black Pentecostal Praying and Preaching”

 Terrion L. Williamson, Michigan State University (MI), “Black Sacred Dance and the Reverberations of Christian Sexuality”

COMMENT:  Johari Jabir, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Molly McGlennen, Vassar College (NY), “Re-imagining “Domestic Dependency”: The Transnational Motivations of Rebecca Belmore’s Sound Performances,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209C

 

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Memorial to Salsa Composer Catalino (Tite) Curet Alonso (1926-2003) in the Plaza de Armas, Image by Flickr User roger4336

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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2012

8:00 am – 9:45 am

 105. Mixtape Logics: Listening to Empire and Resistance

Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B

CHAIR: Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, University of Southern California (CA)

PANELISTS: Priya Jha, University of Redlands (CA)

Van Truong, Yale University (CT)

Chris Nielsen, University of Pittsburgh (PA)

COMMENT: Joshua Guild, Princeton University (NJ)

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108. Caucus: Digital Humanities: What Can the Digital Humanities Bring to American Studies, and Vice Versa?

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A

CHAIR: Susan Garfinkel, Library of Congress (DC)

PANELISTS: Natalia Cecire, Yale University (CT)

Alex Gil, University of Virginia (VA)

Matthew K. Gold, City University of New York, Graduate School (NY)

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Modern Language Association (NY)

Lauren Klein, Georgia Institute of Technology (GA)

Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

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117. Performance as Power and Critique: Social Change in African Diasporic Performance

Puerto Rico Convention Center 208C

CHAIR: Jennifer Devere Brody, Stanford University (CA)

PAPERS: Tisha Brooks, Tufts University (MA) ,“Performing Power and Privilege: The Spiritual Itinerant Practice of Amanda Berry Smith”

Shanesha R. F. Brooks-Tatum, Interdenominational Theological Center (GA), “Sonic Bridges: Conversion Narratives in Diasporic Christian Hip-Hop Performance”

Tanya Saunders, Lehigh University (PA), “Global Hip Hop, Black Feminism, and the Queer of Color Critique: An Analysis of Women-Centered Arts-Based Activism in Cuba and Brazil”

Lori Lynne Brooks, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), “It’s Empire Time!: Black Popular Performance and the Temporality of Imperialism”

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10:00 am – 11:45 am

125. The Talking Cure for Empire? Oral History and Testimonio in the Twenty-first Century

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B

CHAIR: Theresa Delgadillo, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH)

PANELISTS: Tami Albin, University of Kansas (KS)

Maylei Blackwell, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

Thuy Vo Dang, University of California, Irvine (CA)

Theresa Delgadillo, Ohio State University, Columbus (OH)

Linda Garcia Merchant, Artist

Joseph Rodríguez, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (WI)

Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)

Janet Weaver, University of Iowa (IA)

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127. ASA Program Committee: Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Speculation, Futurity, New Materialisms

Puerto Rico Convention Center 103A

CHAIR: Tavia Nyong’o, New York University (NY)

PANELISTS: Jayna Brown, University of California, Riverside (CA)

Tavia Nyong’o, New York University (NY)

Dana Luciano, Georgetown University (DC)

José Esteban Muñoz, New York University (NY)

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131. Caucus: Science and Technology: What is the Future of Technology in American Studies?: A Roundtable

Puerto Rico Convention Center 104C

CHAIR: Jason Weems, University of California, Riverside (CA)

PANELISTS: Carolyn de la Pena, University of California, Davis (CA)

Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (IL)

Joshua Shannon, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)

Elena Razlogova, Concordia University (Canada)

Joel Dinerstein, Tulane University (LA)

COMMENT: Jason Weems, University of California, Riverside (CA)

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133. Caucus: Digital Humanities: Digital Shorts: New Platforms of Knowledge Production and Resistance

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A

CHAIR: A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester (NY)

PANELISTS: Susan Smulyan, Brown University (RI)

Stewart Varner, Emory University (GA)

A. Joan Saab, University of Rochester (NY)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

Thomas George Sowders, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (LA), Puerto Rico Convention Center 208C, “Martin Delany’s Sonic Transnationalism: Genres of Poetry and Sound in Blake; or, the Huts of America

 12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

146. Ask Your Mama: The Sound(ed) Poetics and Politics of Black Feminist Internationalism

Puerto Rico Convention Center 101A

CHAIR: Farah Griffin, Columbia University (NY)

PAPERS: Daphne Ann Brooks, Princeton University (NJ), “‘A Woman is a Sometime Thing’: Leontyne and Sarah’s Sonic Temporalities’

Salamishah Tillet, University of Pennsylvania (PA), “Hush and Listen: Mama Africa and Nina Simone’s Global Civil Rights Sound”

Imani Perry, Princeton University (NJ), “Sounding Like a Movement: The Advance of Miriam Makeba’s Retreat Song”

COMMENT: Farah Griffin, Columbia University (NY)

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

168. Business Meeting of the Digital Humanities Caucus

Puerto Rico Convention Center Foyer A

 

2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

 182. ASA Committee on Graduate Education: Digital Dimensions of Graduate Education in American Studies (co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Caucus and ASA Students’ Committee)

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A

CHAIR: Robert W. Snyder, Rutgers University, Newark (NJ)

PANELISTS: Clarissa J. Ceglio, Brown University (RI)

Douglas Lambert, State University of New York, Buffalo (NY)

Sharon Leon, George Mason University (VA)

John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California (CA)

Stephen Brier, City University of New York, Graduate School (NY)

 

187. Subjectivity and Sound: Rethinking Genre in Chicano/a Music

Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A

CHAIR: Tyina Steptoe, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)

PANELISTS: Anthony Macias, University of California, Riverside (CA)

Marie Miranda, University of Texas, San Antonio (TX)

Michelle Habell-Pallan, University of Washington, Seattle (WA)

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

Marisol Negrón, University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Fania Records, Intellectual Property Rights, and Royalties,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 104B

Isabel Porras, University of California, Davis (CA) “Hypersexual and Excessive: Carmen Miranda and Sofia Vergara and Performing Latinidad,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 203

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

208. Caucus: Sound Studies: Resisting Silences: Re-sounding Race, Gender, and Empire

Puerto Rico Convention Center 204

CHAIR: Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas (KS)

PAPERS: Marci McMahon, University of Texas, Pan American (TX), “Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar: Staging Soundscapes of Silence and Imperialism”

Genevieve Yue, University of Southern California (CA), “Technics of Female Silence”

Jennifer Lynn Stoever-Ackerman, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY), “‘Just Be Quiet Pu-leeze’: New York’s Black Press Fights the Postwar ‘Campaign Against Noise’

COMMENT: Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas (KS)

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213. I’m a MuthaFking Monster: Alter Egos, New Media, and Black/Queer Performativity

Puerto Rico Convention Center 209B

CHAIR: Gabriel Peoples, University of Maryland, College Park (MD)

PAPERS: Treva Lindsey, University of Missouri, Columbia (MO), “I Am… Sasha Fierce: Resistive Alterity and African American Respectability Politics”

Uri McMillan, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), “Gone Campin’: The Campy Paradox of Nicki Minaj”

Kismet Nunez / Jessica Marie Johnson, University of Maryland, College Park (MD), “On Alter Egos and Infinite Literacies, Part 2 (An #AntiJemimas Imperative)”

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Omi/Joni Jones, University of Texas, Austin (TX); Sharon Bridgforth, DePaul University (IL), “Conjuring Jazz”

Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, San Juan, Puerto Rico, by Flickr User Jorge Rodriquez

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2012

 8:00 am – 9:45 am

237. Empires of Funk: U.S. Colonialism, Filipina/o Resistance, and Hip Hop

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A

CHAIR: Victor Hugo Viesca, California State University, Los Angeles (CA)

PAPERS: Mark Villegas, University of California, Irvine (CA), “From Indios to Morenos: Exploring the Poetics and Memory of Postcolonial Racial Positioning”

Lorenzo Perillo, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), “Maganda at Malakas: Gendered Choreographies in Manila”

Roderick Labrador, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, (HI) “Agitation Propaganda: Toward a Filipina/o Revolutionary Internationalism”

COMMENT: Brian Chung, University of Notre Dame (IN)

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242. Aesthetics in the Belly of the Beast: Reading American Carceral Art

Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A

CHAIR: Doran Larson, Hamilton College (NY)

PAPERS: Alessandro Porco, State University of New York, Buffalo (NY), “The ‘And’ After Every Sentence: Hip-Hop, Incarceration, and Creativity”

Imani Kai Johnson, New York University (NY), “B-Boying Behind Bars: A Profile of Batch from The Bronx Boys Rocking Crew”

Marcella Runell Hall, New York University (NY), “Assessment Data on ‘Lyrics from Lockdown,’”

COMMENT: Doran Larson, Hamilton College (NY)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Sarah Perkins, Stanford University (CA), “‘Bound to trabble’: The Circulation of ‘Dixie,’ 1880–1910,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 201A

 Nicholas Bauch, California State University, Los Angeles (CA), “Practicing Geography Through Art Performance: Urban Interventions and the Renaissance of the Vernacular,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209B

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10:00 am – 11:45 am

263. ASA Program Committee: Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Language Ideologies, Spanish in the U.S., and Latinidad

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202B

CHAIR: Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego (CA)

PAPERS: Lourdes Maria Torres, DePaul University (IL), “Spanish in Chicago: Dialects in Contact”

Jonathan Daniel Rosa, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MA), “Racializing Language, Regimenting Latinidad:Latina/o Ethnolinguistic Emblems in Diasporic Perspective”

Lillian Gorman, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL). “The (New) Mexican Familia: Ethnolinguistic Contact Zones in Northern New Mexico”

COMMENT: Ana Celia Zentella, University of California, San Diego (CA)

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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

278. Black Independent Cinema Before and After Pariah

Puerto Rico Convention Center 101B

CHAIR: Kara Keeling, University of Southern California (CA)

PANELISTS: Jennifer DeClue, University of Southern California (CA)

Yvonne Welbon, Bennett College (NC)

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Northwestern University (IL)

Roya Z. Rastegar, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

Kara Keeling, University of Southern California (CA)

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287. West Side Story: A Roundtable Discussion

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202A

CHAIR: Julia Foulkes, New School University (NY)

PANELISTS: Julia Foulkes, New School University (NY)

Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, Mount Holyoke College (MA)

Deborah Paredez, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

Elizabeth Wells, Mt. Allison University (Canada)

Brian Eugenio Herrera, Princeton University (NJ)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Rashida K. Braggs, Williams College (MA), “From Limited to Alternate Citizenship: How Image and Song Perform Historical Resistance in Bayou,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 208A

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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

2nd Annual Sound Studies Meet and Greet! Co-Sponsored by the ASA Sound Studies Caucus and Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog

The District Bar
SHERATON PUERTO RICO HOTEL & CASINO
200 Convention Center Boulevard, San Juan, PR 00907
Cash Bar
Appetizers! Drink Specials! VIP area!

303. Musical Movements

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B

CHAIR: Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)

PAPERS: John Cline, University of Texas, Austin (TX), “Familiar Islands: The U.S., the Bahamas, and the Permeable Boundaries of ‘Folk’ Music”

Mikiko Tachi, Chiba University (Japan), “Folk Music and the Racial Imaginary in the U.S. and Japan”

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Stanford University (CA), “‘I need another world’: Queer Singer-Songwriters in Transnational Collaboration Post-9/11”

COMMENT: Ulrich Adelt, University of Wyoming (WY)

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314. Re-thinking Red, Yellow, Black, and Chicana/o Power through Oral History

Puerto Rico Convention Center 204

CHAIR: Rhonda Williams, Case Western Reserve University(OH)

PAPERS: Lorena Oropeza, University of California, Davis (CA), “He Said, She Said, But Who’s Right?: Oral History Unlocks Anti-Colonialism in 1960s New Mexico”

May Fu, University of San Diego (CA), “Oral History and the Asian American Radical Tradition”

Elizabeth Castle, University of South Dakota (SD), “Talking Back: Native Women’s Oral Histories in the Red Power Movement”

Lauren Araiza, Denison University (OH), “Oral Histories and Multiracial Coalitions in the UFW and the Black Freedom Struggle”

COMMENT: Rhonda Williams, Case Western Reserve University, (OH)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

Rachel Donaldson, Vanderbilt University (TN), “Seeking the ‘Sensual’  and the ‘Significant’: Alan Lomax in Haiti”

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4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

325. Chavela Vargas, La Bamba, and Morrissey: Mapping Queer Musical Diasporas and Desires

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102A

CHAIR: Stacy Macias, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

PAPERS: J. Frank Galarte, University of Arizona (AZ), “‘Que soy muy canalla dice la gente’: The Pleasure of Queer Love, Desire, and Dolor in Chavela Vargas’ Repertoire”

Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, Mount Holyoke College (MA), “Yo también quiero bailar la bamba”: The Policing of Gender in the Chicana/o Son Jarocho Diaspora”

Melissa Hidalgo, Pitzer College (CA), “Complicated Colonial Legacies: Mapping the Queer Chicano Contours of Morrissey’s Los Angeles Fanscape in “Gay Vatos in Love”

COMMENT: Stacy Macias, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

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326. Marginal Digital Knowledges: A Workshop on Technology, Transformation, and Resistance

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102B

CHAIR: Tara McPherson, University of Southern California (CA)

PANELISTS: Simone A. Browne, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

Fiona Barnett, Duke University (NC)

Amanda Phillips, University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)

Tanner Higgin, University of California, Riverside (CA)

Moya Bailey, Emory University (GA)

Alexis Lothian, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (PA)

 

327. Caucus: Sound Studies: Sound and the State: The Politics of Acoustic Power

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102C

CHAIR: Jonathan Sterne, McGill University (Canada)

PAPERS: David Suisman, University of Delaware (DE), “Shock Wave Politics: The Battle Over Sonic Booms”

Peter Tschirhart, University of Virginia (VA), “Part 150 ‘Noise Exposure Maps’ and the Closing of the Acoustic Commons”

COMMENT: Mara Mills, New York University (NY)

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329. Between Island and Diaspora: Locating, Creating, and Performing Afro–Puerto Rican Bomba

Puerto Rico Convention Center 104A

MODERATOR: Tamara Roberts, University of California, Berkeley (CA)

This roundtable brings together bomba practitioners, cultural workers, and scholars from Puerto Rico and California. Rafael Maya and Pablo Luis Rivera will discuss their work as the founders of Proyecto Unión and Restauración Cultural. Sarazeta Ragazzi, Tamara Roberts, and Denise Solis will detail their work in the all-women’s performance ensemble Las Bomberas de la Bahia (San Francisco Bay Area). And Jade Power Sotomayor will extend the discussion of cross-cultural connections byconsidering the large Chicano participation in the form in the U.S., underscoring the ways that Latinidad and more specifically, Afro-Latinidad are corporeally articulated through this embodied practice.

Congas, Image courtesy of Flickr User Richard Alexander Caraballo

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012

8:00 am – 9:45 am

 365. Doing Disciplinarity: Puerto Rican Studies is/as/withAmerican Studies

Puerto Rico Convention Center 204

CHAIR: Marta S. Rivera Monclova, Framingham State College (MA)

PANELISTS: Marta S. Rivera Monclova, Framingham State College (MA)

Liana Marie Silva, State University of New York, Binghamton (NY)

Leonardo L. Flores Feliciano, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez (PR)

Sara Poggio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (MD)

 

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS

Nadia Ellis, University of California, Berkeley (CA), “Dancehall’s Urban Possessions,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 101A

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10:00 am – 11:45 am

377. Jazz and the Voices of Empire and Resistance

Puerto Rico Convention Center 102A

CHAIR: John Gennari, University of Vermont (VT)

PAPERS: Daniel Stein, University of Goettingen (Germany), “Onkel Satchmo Behind the Iron Curtain: The Politics of Louis Armstrong’s Visit to East Germany”

Elliott H. Powell, New York University (NY), “Solidarity in Sound: John Coltrane, Indian Music, and Global Freedom Struggles”

Matthew B. Karush, George Mason University (VA), “Transnational Routes: Argentine Encounters with Jazz, 1959–1972”

COMMENT: John Gennari, University of Vermont (VT)

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INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Daphne Lamothe, Smith College (MA), “Trauma, Silence, and the Language of Resistance in Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying”

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12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

 Imani D. Owens, Columbia University (NY), “The Politics of Sound: Race, Space, and Cuban Identity in the Poetry of Nicolás Guillén,” Puerto Rico Convention Center 209A

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2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

420. Terrains of Modernity, Aural Research, and Critique

Puerto Rico Convention Center 104C

CHAIR: Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)

PAPERS: Art Blake, Ryerson University (Canada), “John Cage’s Voice and New York’s Postwar Urban Sensorium”

Derek Vaillant, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), “The Power of Piaf: Racial Formation and Nostalgia in Postwar U.S.-France Aural Culture”

Jason Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (MD), “Radio Localism 2.0”

Benjamin Aslinger, Bentley College (MA), “Listening In to Web 2.0: Subjectivity, Alterity, and Power”

COMMENT: Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)

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423. Los Nombres: Puerto Rican Popular Music in Lorain, Ohio

Puerto Rico Convention Center 202C

CHAIR: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA)

PANELISTS: Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA)

Eugene Rivera, Jr., Independent Scholar

José Pepe Rivera, Sr., Artist

..

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS:

Mike Amezcua, Northwestern University (IL), “Brown Bop: Mexican American Jazzmen, Race, and the Quest for a Transnational Jazz Movement”

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Image courtesy of Ricymar Fine Art Photography

SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format

The promiscuity of the mp3. Borrowed from NYCArthur on Flickr.

The point that had lingered with me after first reading Jonathan Sterne’s essay “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact,” was the idea that the mp3 was a promiscuous technology. “In a media-saturated environment,” Sterne writes, “portability and ease of acquisition trumps monomaniacle attention . . . at the psychoacoustic level as well as the industrial level, the mp3 is designed for promiscuity. This has been a long-term goal in the design of sound reproduction technologies” (836).  A technology, promiscuous? I did not have to look far to find support. Like germs, I could find copies of mp3s that I had downloaded from Napster in 2000 scattered across generations of my old hard drives. Often they were redundant, too – iTunes having archived a copy separate from my original download.

But, for Sterne, mp3s are also socially promiscuous. They accumulate in the hard drives of the working class and are shared, almost anywhere, through the branching left/right wires of iPod earbuds. Since the popularization of the mp3, there have been new opportunities to share how we listen with others. This is promise of the mp3, and the reason it forms such a key point of scholarly meditation.

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) finds Sterne revisiting many of these key themes, with a larger focus on the genealogical beginnings of the mp3 technology. While many of the book’s chapters are extrapolations of prior work Sterne has done regarding the genealogy of listening practices, this work concerns itself less with the 19th century, and more with the 20th century. Perhaps this is related to some of the methodological decisions Sterne has made in planning the book – in seeking out the genealogical origins of the mp3, Sterne worked from archives and manuals described in interviews by engineers who were fundamental to the technology’s production. As such it finds much in common with Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s Analog Days and Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach but incorporates the genealogical methods regarding sonic technology present in Sterne’s earlier work The Audible Past and Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity. In MP3 Sterne positions himself as a critical cultural studies scholar working between the humanities and sciences, focusing specifically on the mp3 due to its social and technological relevance today. The critical is key here as MP3 is truly a work devised to underscore the economic connections between the construction of our selves as “hearing subjects” and the media industries.

Certainly, the mp3 can still be considered a promiscuous technology, but it is corporate capitalism that had failed to recognize the extent to which it relies on technological promiscuity to support its infrastructure. This focus, ironically, displaces the mp3 as the main object of Sterne’s analysis. It highlights instead the pathological logic of corporate capitalism, and the ways that this rationality has mutated, now, in the wake of mass replicable, malleable, and iterative digital culture. In other words, the mp3 is endemic to a much larger plot, wherein the culture industries adapt to their own deus ex-machina. The naive development of the mp3 by the motion picture industry is a large part of the story here, but it is only a small bit of a much larger whole. The real story involves understanding how a handful of vested corporate interests have shaped the ways that we interpret and understand what listening is. In MP3 Sterne addresses one of the great questions of sound studies: What are the politics of listening? Or, which individuals and institutions have a vested economic interest in questions of how we hear?

Sterne recalls this drama in three parts, each unfolding in a somewhat autonomous fashion, but unified in so far as they explore the economic interests behind the scientific construction of “hearing subjects.” In the first part, Sterne is at his best exploring AT&T’s (and the affiliated Bell Laboratories’) role in funding psychological, physiological, and cybernetic research on hearing. In the second, Sterne explains how this early research has been applied to the visual and technical abstraction of sound in the 1970s. And, in the third part of this genealogy, he explains how these analogs were made digital, specifically the corporate politics which went into the construction of the mp3 standard. Throughout this surprising and detailed trajectory, Sterne makes the invisibility of corporate interests apparent and explicit.

AT&T and Infrastructure. Borrowed from djbones on Flickr.

Sterne also hints toward several powerful economic rationalities that have guided the construction of the mp3. Key among these insights is the monetization of cybernetic discourse, or the incorporation of the human body within a scientific understanding of technical systems. In order to engineer an efficient technical system, the capacities and limits of how we interact with (or serve as parts of) these systems must be taken into account. Sterne refers to this mode of engineering as “perceptual technics,” and he goes to great lengths to explain it.

Basically, at the turn of the 20th century, AT&T had taken a keen interest in the science of how people listen because they wanted to maximize the amount of simultaneous conversations broadcast through a single telephone wire. More conversations meant the purchase of fewer wires, and therefore greater profits. Eventually, drawing on the research of the oft-cited Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (within SO!: What Mixtapes Can Teach Us About Nois and Pushing Record; and soundBox: Mapping Noise), AT&T recognized an economic problem of technical efficiency within their wires – there was too much ambient noise. Because of this, AT&T sought to limit the audible signal transmitted from one phone to another. This would allow for more signals (and therefore conversations) to be transmitted through the same wire. Physiological research provided clues that some frequencies were more audible than others, so engineers worked to compress audio signals to reflect this scientific abstraction of hearing.

The scientific capture of listening. Borrowed from img.informer.com .

The reduction of listening–as an embodied practice–to the quantification and control of the audible spectrum, is, in other words, the history of compression. Which, according to Sterne, should be understood as the true meaning of the mp3. While the mp3 format, like the CD or cassette, may become obsolete, technologies of compression will not. Sterne argues convincingly that most advances in compression technologies have been guided by the invisible logic of corporate capitalism. It is this exact tendency of compression–to make things smaller and more efficient–that threatened to undo the entire project of corporate and branded music distribution in the year 2000, via platforms like Napster.  Sterne is well aware of this irony throughout MP3, and uses the final chapter to discuss, briefly, the moment of cultural transformation that is defined by file-sharing and mass distribution.

Bringing things full circle with a somewhat stoic conclusion about the democratic potentials of this moment, he remarks: “The end of the artificial scarcity of recording is a moment of great potential. Its political outcome is still very much in question, but its political meaning should not be” (224). Sterne points to the globalization and ubiquity of mediated listening as a sign that things may not have changed much even though mass networked society at one point promised freedom from a commodity form which privileged things like “liberal notions of property, alienated labor, and ownership” (224). He argues that even the music industries shall persevere, mostly because people have a sublime attraction to listening and music. In other words: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. There are few moments of liberation to be found within MP3; it is instead a drama of the status quo where the conspirators of corporate capitalism succeed in spite of themselves.

The ubiquity of listening. Borrowed from κεηι on Flickr.

The disparity in Sterne’s tone, when juxtaposing the nefarious and efficient dispositifs of capitalism with an untroubled and authentic construction of music is striking to say the least. And although Sterne is clear to explain that he locates his scholarship as work on a container technology (the mp3) and not its content (the music), this is a somewhat unsatisfying distinction as an embodied practice, such as listening, must take both into account. And while I agree that the mp3 reflects the promiscuity of corporate capitalism, is this challenged by the plethora of ideological nuance coded into song lyrics and arrangements? Do the corporate ideologies of the music industries flow beyond the container of the mp3 into the music itself? Is there any crosstalk, or overlap between these historical constructions? In other words, what are the limits to theorizing a container technology, and how much does the discursive path of the mp3 sculpt the content of what we listen to?

Despite, or perhaps, because of the rather dystopic scene that Sterne alludes to at the end of MP3, it falls nicely in the space between Sound Studies and Critical Information Studies. It bridges humanistic scholarship on embodied listening practices with a critique of the economic interests that have funded much of the scientific research relating to the phenomenology of sound. To that end, MP3 reveals much about the social construction of hearing and the ways that the familiar mythology of audio fidelity has been produced, discussed and exploited by several communication industries. Even though the mp3 may have been eclipsed by industry as the main object of inquiry in the eponomously titled MP3, Sterne succeeds admirably in detailing the promiscuity of corporate capitalism in the listening practices of our everyday lives.

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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University.

Sound at AMS/SEM/SMT 2012

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This week brings us #musicon12, the megaconference of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT). This will be the third joint conference of these societies, after Oakland in 1990 and Toronto in 2000. These roughly decennial gatherings of the three principal scholarly societies of music scholarship provide increased opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversations and amazing live performances. A fact augmented even more by the selection of New Orleans, a city known for its music, for this year’s meeting.

The conference takes place in the Sheraton and Astor Crowne Plaza hotels from this Wednesday, October 31st through Sunday, November 4th. It will be preceded by two events. The first, occurring Monday, October 29th and Tuesday, October 30th, at Tulane University’s Rogers Memorial Chapel, is Ecomusicologies2012, a pre-conference organized by the AMS Ecocriticism Study Group and the SEM Ecomusicology Special Interest Group. The second, all day Wednesday, October 31st, is the Preconference Symposium on Crisis and Creativity, held at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University.

The disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory have focused on sound for centuries. They are the disciplines that Michael Bull argues Sound Studies “goes beyond” in the upcoming anthology Sound Studies. While such a description could lead to the categorization of these disciplines as theoretically or methodologically antiquated, #musicon12 is too large and significant for Sound Studies to ignore, with over 600 individual presentations that all deal with sound or music somehow. The first eleven papers, in chronological order, should give some idea of the overall scope:

Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
Kim Carter Muñoz (University of Washington), “‘¡Todos somos huastecos! ‘We are all Huastecan!’: Performance of the Democratization of Son Huasteco at El Festival de la huasteca (The Festival of the Huasteca)”
Raquel Paraíso (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Festival Son Raíz: Building Community and Signifying Identity and Culture Ownership across Mexican Regions”
Ian Middleton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Identity, Peace, and Learning at Rural Music Festivals in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”
Brenda M. Romero (University of Colorado, Boulder), “‘El Carnaval de Río Sucio No Es Festival’ / ‘The Carnival of Río Sucio is Not a Festival’”
Michael O’Toole (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing Publics in a ‘Turkish Art Music’ Ensemble in Berlin”
Suzanne Wint (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing the Social: Becoming a Performer in Kampala’s Classical Music Scene”
Gregory Weinstein (University of Chicago), “Recording Rehearsing: The Hidden ‘Process of the Classical Studio Session’”

But for the sake of argument, if Sound Studies is something more than simply the application of long-standing disciplinary approaches to sonic works and events, if, as Jonathan Sterne proposed this year in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, “the difference between sound studies and… other fields is that they don’t require engagement with alternative epistemologies, methods, or approaches” (4), then we are inclined to pay attention to that work that reaches beyond the limits of conventional music scholarship, namely the sort which strives for some sort of critical self-reflection or interdisciplinary ambition.

Lost Bayou Ramblers. Borrowed from phillipleroyer on Flickr.

This is not an easy task given the vast number of papers and performances at such a large conference and the scarcity of information found in brief titles and abstracts. We can assume that every presentation challenges these conventions to some extent, but for the sake of this preview, here are a few items that venture beyond the traditional limits of music scholarship. You can find the full #musicon12 program here.

Featured Image: Mardi Gras 2005, By Robert Garcia, The City Project

Bill Bahng Boyer is an adjunct professor of music, writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is also a doctoral candidate in music at New York University, completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.

Jump to MONDAY, October 29
Jump to TUESDAY, October 30
Jump to WEDNESDAY, October 31
Jump to THURSDAY, November 1
Jump to FRIDAY, November 2
Jump to SATURDAY, November 3
Jump to SUNDAY, November 4

New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2005, Borrowed From Robert Garcia, The City Project



MONDAY, October 29

Ecomusicologies2012

All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University

5-6pm Soundwalk

Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Environmental Listening and the Tulane Soundscape” (meeting place outside the entrance of the Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University)

7-9pm Paper Jam

Chair: Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Joe Browning (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) (virtual presentation), “Crane Calls and Shakuhachi Sounds: Interconnections, Disjunctures and New Directions in the Tsuru no Sugomori Pieces”

Travis Stimeling (Millikin University) (virtual presentation), “Music, Television Advertising, and the Green Positioning of the Global Energy Industry in the United States”

Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska (Northwestern University) (virtual presentation), “Theorizing the Musical Landscapes of John Luther Adams”

Andrew Mark (York University) (virtual presentation), “Consciousness, Solidarity, and Musicking: Ecoethnographic Justice”

Leah G. Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Orchestrating Nature: Music, Manipulation, and 1950s America in Disney’s True- Life Adventure Films”

Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo (Middlesex University), “Sounds Heard: the Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics of Hugh Davies’s Music”

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “Negotiating Nature & Music Through Technology: Ecological Reflections in the Works of Maggi Payne & Laurie Spiegel”

The Canal Street Line. Borrowed from Hmeriomx on Flickr.



TUESDAY, October 30

Ecomusicologies2012 (cont.)

All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University

8:30-10:30am Panel: Beyond Metaphor

Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair

Marc Perlman (Brown University), “Instrument Builders As Environmental Activists: A Tale of Two Tonewoods”

Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “Small is Beautiful: Guitar Making, Sustainability and Community Building in Britain and Africa”

Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), “Why Thoreau?”

Jennifer C. Post (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington), “Beyond Birds: (Ethno)musicologists, Environmental Scientists & the Evolution of Soundscape Ecology”

11am-1pm Panel: 20th & 21st-century Composers

Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Chair

Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin), “The Peasant’s Voice and the Tourist’s Gaze:  Listening to Landscape in Luc Ferrari’sPetite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps”

You Nakai (New York University), “An Electronic Ecology:  The Natures of David Tudor’s Electronic Music”

Jacob A. Cohen (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “Carl Ruggles, Walt Whitman, and the Gendered Place of Men and Mountains”

Joseph Finkel (Arizona State University), “Searching for a Sonic Ecology:  John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves”

2-3:30pm, Panel: Contemporary Issues

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), Chair

Melissa J. de Graaf (University of Miami), “‘The Music of Nature Makes Me Dream and Sleep’: Intersections of Nature, Gender, and Ultramodernism”

Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), “Agency and Aural Rights: Negotiating the Soundscape, 1948 to the Present”

Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Emergent Soundscapes: Uses of Nature and Technology in Two Electroacoustic Compositions”

4-6pm, Panel: Ethnographic Approaches

William Bares (University of North Carolina, Asheville), Chair

Dan Bendrups (Queensland Conservatorium Resarch Centre, Griffith University), “Mapping Outdoor Music Festival Engagement with Ecological and Environmental Issues in Australia”

Robin Ryan (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University), “Eucalyptus as Musical Resource: Some Ecological Considerations”

Michael Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), “Birdsong, Popular Music, &Predicting Rain in Northeastern Brazil”

Charlotte D’Evelyn (University of Hawaii), “Sounds of the Grasslands: An Ecomusicological Crisis of Romanticism, Loss, & Inheritance in Inner Mongolia, China”

6:30-8pm, Panel: Canadian Perspectives

Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Chair

Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding the Environmental Past and Present: Repurposing and Representing Soundscape in Contemporary Canadian Compositions”

Erin Scheffer (University of Toronto), “The Mis-imagined Native: Musically Constructing Nativeness in 1940s Canadian Radio and Film Docudramas”

Jeremy Strachan (University of Toronto), “Sounding Empire: Coloniality and Environment in Canadian Art Music”

8-9pm, Reception & Concert

James Harley (University of Guelph), computer, and Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), amplified flutes, “Birding,” an eco-improvisational performance by ~spin~

Borrowed from mattbyrne on Flickr.



WEDNESDAY, October 31

SEM Pre-conference Symposium, Crisis and Creativity

All events at Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, Tulane University

9:00-10:30am, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans

Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), Chair

Nick Spitzer, Professor of Anthropology (Tulane University), Holly Hobbs, Director of the NOLA Hip-Hop Archive (Tulane University), Bennie Pete, leader of Hot 8 Brass Band

10:45-12:15pm New Realities: Haitian Performing Arts and the Built Environment

Joyce Jackson (Louisiana State University), Chair

Gage Averill, Dean of Arts (University of British Columbia)

Michael Largey, Professor of Ethnomusicology (Michigan State University)

Jean Montes, Director of Orchestral Studies (Loyola University New Orleans)

1:15-2:45pm, Environmental Crises in South Louisiana: Scientific, Sociological, and Ethnomusicological Perspectives

Mark DeWitt (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Chair

Tommy Michot, Research Scientist (UL Lafayette), and member of Les Frères Michot

Robert Gramling, Professor of Sociology (UL Lafayette)

Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music (UL Lafayette)

3:00-5:00pm, Field Trip by Bus to Musician’s Village, New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (Upper Ninth Ward), House of Dance and Feathers (Lower Ninth Ward)

Milterngerger House. Borrowed from DavidPaulOhmer on Flickr.



THURSDAY, November 1

8:30-10:30am, The Beautiful, The Good, and The Story: Aesthetics and Narrative in Religious Music

Session 1-1 (SEM) A: Astor Ballroom 1

Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), Chair

Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”

Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”

Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”

Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”

12:30-1:30pm, SEM Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting

S: Oakley

3:30-5:00pm, On Bells, Bugs, and Disintegrating Tape: Listening for Metaphysics in Ambient Sound

Session 1-44 AMS/SEM S. Edgewood

Mitchell Morris (University of California, Los Angeles), Chair

Paul Chaikin (University of Southern California), “Clattering Bells as a Field of Experience and Cognition”

James Edwards (University of California, Los Angeles), “Nature and the Metaphysics of Voice in Edo Period Aesthetics”

Joanna Demers (University of Southern California), “The Ethics of Apocalypse”

4:00-5:30pm, Musically Meaningful Soundscapes

Session 1-52 SEM S: Maurepas

Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Chair

Alison Furlong (Ohio State University), “Sound, Space, and Social Practice in the Zionskirche”

Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding and Composing the Harbour: Performing Landscape and Re-contextualizing the Soundscape of Place in the Harbour Symphony (St. John’s, Newfoundland)”

Jessamyn Doan (University of Pennsylvania), “‘Bringin’ Back the Roots’: Rearticulating a Creole Sound in Southern Louisiana”

5:30–6:30pm, SEM First-Time Attendees and New Members

Reception S: Sheraton Grand B

5:30–6:30pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG* and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Joint Business Meeting

S: Oak Alley

7:30–midnight, Zydeco Dance Lesson and Evening at Rock’n’Bowl

Organized by the SEM 2012 Local Arrangements Committee and the SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section

Dance Lesson at Sheraton Grand E (no ticket required), 7:30–8:30 p.m.

Evening at Rock’n’Bowl. Bus Departs Sheraton: 8:45 p.m. Bus Departs Rock’n’Bowl for Sheraton: 12:00 midnight

8:00–11:00 AMS Music and Philosophy SG Session

A: Astor Ballroom III

8:00-11:00pm, Fantasy, Cinema, Sound, and Music

Session 1-58 AMS S: Oak Alley

Mark Brill (University of Texas at San Antonio)

James Deaville (Carleton University)

J. Drew Stephen (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Jamie Lynn Webster (Portland, Ore.)

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Nature: Relations, Awareness, Knowledge

Session 1-64 AMS S: Borgne
Sponsored by the AMS Ecocriticism SG

Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Chair

Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “RELATIONS—A Social and Environmental History of Small Guitar Workshops in England”

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “AWARENESS—‘Hello, the Earth is Speaking’: Four Case Studies of Ecological Composition, Performance, and Listening”

David E. Cohen (Columbia University), “KNOWLEDGE—Nature, Culture, and the First Principle(s) of Music: Two Myths of Theoretical Revelation”

Borrowed from prayitno on Flickr.



FRIDAY, November 2

7:00–8:00am, SEM SIG for Voice Studies

S: Estherwood

7:00–8:30am, SMT Committee on the Status of Women

S: Roux Bistro Private

9:00-noon, The Ecomusicology Listening Room

Session 2-17 AMS/SEM S: Gallier
Co-Sponsored by the SEM Sound Studies Interest Group and the AMS Popular Music Study Group

Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair

Robert Fallon (Carnegie Mellon University), Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Naomi Perley (CUNY), William Bares (Harvard University), Rachel Mundy (Columbia University), Jeremy Woodruff (University of Pittsburgh), Justin D. Burton (Rider University), Michael Austin (University of Texas at Dallas), Michael B. Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), Miki Kaneda (Museum of Modern Art), Zeynep Bulut (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)

10:30-noon, Beyond Hearing: Soundscapes and Ideoscape in Early Nineteenth-Century America

Session 2-25 AMS/SEM A: Iberville
Deane Root (University of Pittsburgh), Chair

Sarah Gerk (University of Michigan), “Love, Loyalty, and Fear: American Reception of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies”

Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia), “Mr. Jefferson’s Ears”

12:00–2:00pm, AMS/SMT Music and Philosophy SG/IG

S: Sheraton Grand A

12:30–1:30pm, SEM Medical Ethnomusicology SIG

A: Astor Grand A

12:30–1:30pm, SEM Section on the Status of Women

S: Bayside C

2:00-5:00pm, Embodiment and Gesture

Session 2-38 AMS/SMT S: Oak Alley

Arnie Cox (Oberlin College), Chair

Margaret Britton (University of Texas at Austin), “Four Gestural Types in Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp Minor, Op. 50, no. 3”

Drew Massey (Binghamton University), “Thomas Adès’s Glossary”

Meghan Goodchild (CIRMMT / McGill University), “Towards a PerceptuallyBased Theory of Orchestral Gestures”

Zachary Wallmark, Marco Iacoboni (University of California, Los Angeles), “Embodied Listening and Musical Empathy: Perspectives from Mirror Neuron Research”

4:00-5:30pm, SEM Charles Seeger Lecture

Session 2-49 SEM S: Sheraton Grand C

Portia Maultsby (Indiana University), “‘Everybody Wanna Sing my Blues . . . Nobody Wanna Live My Blues’: Deconstructing Narratives of Race, Culture and Power in African American Music Scholarship”

Cheryl L. Keyes (University of California, Los Angeles), Introduction

6:00pm, Sound Studies Special Interest Group Soundwalk

Meet in front of the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street

Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), organizer

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Video Games: History, Theory, Ethnography

Session 2-55 AMS S: Gallier

William Cheng (Harvard University), Moderator

Mark Katz (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Respondent

Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Musicological Contributions to Early Video Game Studies”

Roger Moseley (Cornell University), “Digital Analogies”

William Gibbons (Texas Christian University), “Framing Devices for Gaming Devices: Applying Film Music Theory to Video Games”

Elizabeth Medina-Gray (Yale University), “Modularity and Dynamic Play: Video Game Music and Its Avant-garde Antecedents”

Kiri Miller (Brown University), “Dance Central and the Listening Body”

Borrowed from squared2x on Flickr.



SATURDAY, November 3

7:00–8:30am, SMT Music and Disability IG

S: Salon 828

7:00–8:45am, AMS Committee on Women and Gender

S: Salon 825

8:30-10:30am, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, I: Music Tourism in the Aftermath of Rupture in New Orleans, Berlin, Bali

Session 3-2 SEM S: Bayside B
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), Chair

Elizabeth Macy (University of California, Los Angeles), “Music and Cultural Tourism in Post-Disaster Economies”

Luis-Manuel Garcia (Tulane University), “Consuming Atmospheres and Social Worlds: ‘Techno-Tourismus’ and Post-Tourist Tourism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes”

Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), “Dithyrambalina: A Shantytown Sound Installation in Post-Katrina New Orleans”

SherriLynn Colby-Bottel (University of Virginia), “Authenticity Seekers: Music Post-Tourists and the Shifting Sound-Scapes of New Orleans”

8:30-10:30am, Online Musical Communities

Session 3-7 AMS/SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Marc Gidal (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Chair

Tara Browner (University of California, Los Angeles), “Bach Culture: Performers, Scholars, and Bachfreunde in the Twenty-First Century”

Olga Panteleeva (University of California, Berkeley), “Für Kenner und Liebhaber 2.0: Modes of Expertise in Online File-Sharing Communities”

Tom Artiss (University of Cambridge), “Solitary Socialities: Music Surf-Sharing in Nain, Labrador”

Charles Hiroshi Garrett (University of Michigan), “Joking Matters: Music, Humor, and the Digital Revolution”

9:00-10:30am, Language and the Senses

Session 3-10 AMS/SMT S: Edgewood
Donald Boomgaarden (Loyola University New Orleans), Chair

Charles Dill (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Le Cerf’s Epistemology of Music”

Amy M. Cimini (University of Pennsylvania), “René Descartes’ Unfinished Compendium of Music: Rethinking Music and the Politics of Sensation after the Thirty Years’ War

9:00-10:30am, Music and Gaming

Session 3-12 AMS A: Iberville
Kiri Miller (Brown University), Chair

Christopher Tonelli (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “The Chiptuning of the World”

Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Investigating the Origins of Video Game Music Style, 1977–1983: The Early Cinema Hypothesis”

9:00-noon, Performing Music, Performing Disability

Session 3-19 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Bayside A
Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY), Chair

Michael Bakan (Florida State University), Michael Beckerman (New York University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Blake Howe (Louisiana State University), Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Bruce Quaglia (University of Utah)

9:00-noon, Sound, Language, and Mysticism from Vienna to L.A.

Session 3-22 AMS S:Borgne
Brian Kane (Yale University), Chair

Clara Latham (New York University), “The Impact of Sound and Voice on the Invention of Psychoanalysis”

Sherry Lee (University of Toronto), “‘Still, o schweige’: Music, Language, OpernKrise (Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand )”

Nicholas Attfield (Edinburgh University), “A Medieval Model for the 1920s: Anton Bruckner as Mystic”

J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina), “I Care If You Listen: Schoenberg’s ‘School of Criticism’ and the Role of the Amateur”

10:30-noon, Twentieth-Century Music and Advertising

Session 3-28 AMS A: Iberville

Jason Hanley (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Chair

Paul Christiansen (University of Southern Maine), “‘It’s Morning Again in America’: How the Tuesday Team Revolutionized the Use of Music in Political Ads”

Jonathan Waxman (New York University), “I Went to the New York Philharmonic and Came Home with a Cadillac: The Alliance Between Business and the Arts in the Early Twentieth Century

12:00–2:00pm, SMT Committee on the Status of Women Brown Bag Open Lunch

S: Salon 828

12:30–1:30pm SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce

S: Bayside C

1:45-3:45pm, Acoustics and Experiences of the Limit

Session 3-39 SEM S: Maurepas

Louise Meintjes (Duke University), Chair

Louise Meintjes (Duke University), “Pushing at the Edge of the Social”

Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), “Signatures of the Audible”

Ana Maria Ochoa (Columbia University), “South American Acoustics: Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Linear Musical Histories”

Gary Tomlinson (Yale University), “Singing at the Limit of the Human”

1:45-3:45pm, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, II: Multimedia, Spectacles and Memorials

Session 3-43 SEM S: Grand Chenier
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)

Lynda Paul (Yale University), Chair

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (University of Georgia), “Elvis Presley and the Reanimation of Robert E. Lee”

Lynda Paul (Yale University), “Las Vegas and Virtual Tourism: Sonic Shaping of Simulated Worlds”

Michael Heller (Harvard University), “Deployments of Deadness at the Louis Armstrong House Museum”

Nicol Hammond (New York University), “‘The History Is in the Music’? Music, Museums, and the Politics of Presence in Post-Apartheid Cultural Tourism”

8:00-11:00pm, Music and Disability: Works in Progress Seminar

AMS/SMT S: Bayside A
Sponsored by the AMS Disability SG and SMT Disability IG

Michael Bakan (Florida State University), James Deaville (Carleton University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Jeanette Jones (Boston University), Anabel Maler (University of Chicago), Julie Saiki (Stanford University), Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY)

9:00pm, KNOCKABOUT: wandering beats from across urban America.

Handsome Willy’s at 218 South Robertson St. No cover. 21+

5 DJs converge on Handsome Willy’s for KNOCKABOUT, a dance party featuring every genre you’ve ever loved and fly beats that you neva eva heard before.

DJ Yamin (NOLA): Hip-hop, funk, reggae, Afrobeat www.nolamix.com

DJ Super Squirrel (Boston): Dancehall, global mashup www.djsupersquirrel.com

The Attic Bat (L.A.): Hip-hop and dubstep www.derricomusic.com

LMGM (Chicago, Berlin): House and disco www.thelusisgarcia.com

Shilo Bourne (L.A.) UK bass

Roger Lewis. Borrowed from fantailmedia at Fiickr.



Further Experiments in Agent-based Musical Composition

Photo by whistler1984 @Flickr.

Editor’s Note:  WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST IS INTERACTIVE!!!  This week’s post is especially designed by one of our regulars, Andreas Duus Pape, to spark conversation and provoke debate on its comment page.  I  have directly solicited feedback and commentary from several top sound studies scholars, thinkers, artists, and musicians, who will be posting at various times throughout the day and the week–responding to Andreas, responding to each other, and responding to your comments.  Look for commentary by Bill Bahng Boyer (NYU), Maile Colbert(Binaural/Nodar, Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto), Nick Knouf (Cornell University), Primus Luta (AvantUrb, Concrète Sound System), Alejandro L. Madrid (University of Illinois at Chicago), Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), Jonathan Skinner (ecopoetics),  Jonathan Sterne (McGill University), Aaron Trammell (Rutgers University, Sounding Out!) and yours truly (Binghamton University, Sounding Out!).  Full bios of our special respondents follow the post. We wholeheartedly wish to entice you this Monday to play. . .and listen. . .and then share your thoughts via the comment page. . .and play again. . .listen again. . .read the comments. . .and share more thoughts. . .yeah, just go ahead and loop that.  –JSA, Editor-in-Chief

I’m a musician and an economist. Sometimes you will find me playing acoustic folk rock and blues on guitar, harmonica and voice. And at other times I will be at work, where I apply my expertise in game theory to the computer modeling of social phenomena. I create simulations of people interacting – such as how people decide which way to vote on an issue such as a tax levy, or how people learn to sort objects given to them in an experiment. In these simulations, the user can set up characteristics of the environment, such as the number of people and their individual goals. After things are set up, users watch these interactions unfold. The simulation is a little story, and one need only tweak the inputs to see how the story changes.

As a musician, I was curious if a program that generates social stories could be refashioned to generate musical pieces. I wanted to build a music-generation engine that the listener could tweak in order to get a different piece each time. But not just any tune – a piece with some flow, some story. I like that tension between randomness and structure. On one hand, I want every song to vary in unpredictable ways; on the other hand, I want to create music and not structureless noise.

I created a basic story of predators and prey, whimsically naming the prey “Peters,” represented by rabbits, and the predators “Wolves.” My simulation depicts a plain in the savannah with a green oasis. The prey seek the oasis and the predators seek the prey. Each character has its own goals and the closer they are to achieving them, the happier they are. Both predators and prey want to have stomachs full of food, so naturally they want to be close to their target (be it prey or oasis). As they travel through the savannah, they learn what choices (directions of movement) make them happier, and use this experience to guide them.

Photo by bantam10 @Flickr

So how does this story become music? To this question there are two answers: a technical one and an intuitive one. The intuitive answer is that in real life the story of predators and prey plays out geographically on the savannah, but musically this is a story that plays out over a sonic landscape. To elaborate, I abstracted the movement of the prey and predator on the geography of the plain into the musical geometry of a sonic landscape. The farther north an agent travels, the higher the pitch. And, the farther east an agent travels the longer the duration. In other words, as an agent travels to the northwest, she makes longer-lasting tones that are higher pitched. I also mapped happiness to volume, so that happy agents make louder tones. Finally, so that each agent would have a distinct voice as they traveled through this space, I chose different instruments for each agent.

In the video below I assigned the “church organ” sound to prey, and the “brass section” sound to predators.

Ultimately, there are some things that I like about this piece and others that I do not.

As a harmonica player, I improvise by creating and resolving tension. I think this piece does that well. The predator will pursue the prey into a quiet, low-pitch corner, creating a distant, rumbling sound – only to watch prey escape to the densely polyphonic northwest corner. There is an ebb and flow to this chase that I recognize from blues harmonica solos. In contrast to my experience as a harmonica player, however, I have found that some of the most compelling parts of the dynamics come from the layering of notes. The addition of notes yields a rich sonic texture, much like adding notes to a chord on an organ.

Unfortunately, for largely technical reasons, there is a lack of coherent rhythm and pacing. The programming platform (agent-based modeling software called NetLogo) is not designed to have the interface proceed in real-time. Basically, the overall speed of the piece can change as the processing load increases or decreases. I found that as agents learnt more about their surroundings (and more system resources are allocated to this “memory”), they became slower and slower. To fix this, I capped the size of their memory banks so that they would forget their oldest memories. The closest I have come to a rhythmic structure is by ordering the way that the agents play. This technique makes the piece have a call-and-response feel. If only the piece to had a coherent rhythm,  then I could imagine playing harmonica along with it.

One last comment on pitch: while an earlier version of this piece mapped each step in space to a semitone, things sounded too mechanical. Even though this was the easiest and most intuitive decision from a technical standpoint, it was aesthetically lacking, so I have now integrated traditional musical scales. The minor scale, in my opinion, is the most interesting as it makes the predator/prey dynamic sound appropriately foreboding.

Photo by deivorytower @Flickr.

You can play this piece yourself. Simply go to this link with Java enabled in your browser (recommended: Google Chrome). Pressing “Setup” then “Go” will create your own run of the piece. As it is running, you can adjust the slider above the graphic window to change the speed. Press “Go” again to stop the model, adjust any parameters you wish and press “Setup” and “Go” again to see how the piece changes. Here are some parameters to try: instA and instB to change the instruments associated with prey and predators; PlayEveryXSteps to change the pace of the piece (higher results in a slower paced piece); Num-PackAs and Num-PackBs changes the number of prey and predators; the vertical PeterVol and WolfVol adjust the overall volume of prey and predators.

In regards to my version of “Peter and the Wolf,” I have a number of things that I’m curious about.

First, how does this relate to what you think of as music? Do you like listening to it? Which elements do you like and which do you dislike? For example, what do you think about about the tension and rhythm – do you agree the first works and that the second could be improved? Would you listen to this for enjoyments’ sake, and what would it take for this to be more than a novelty? What do you think about the narrative that drives the piece? I chose the predator and prey narrative, admittedly, on a whim. Do you think there might be some other narrative or agent specific goals that might better drive this piece? Is there any metaphor that might better describe this piece? As a listener do you enjoy the experience of being able to customize and configure the piece? What would you like to have control over that is missing here? Would you like more interaction with the piece or less interaction?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do you think of the premise? Can simple electronic agents (albeit ones which interact socially) aspire to create music? Is there something promising in this act of simulation? Is music-making necessarily a human activity and is this kind of work destined to be artificial and uncanny?

Thanks for listening. I look forward to your thoughts.

“The Birth of Electronic Man.” Photo by xdxd_vs_xdxd @Flickr.

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Andreas Duus Pape is an economist and a musician. As an economist, he studies microeconomic theory and game theory–that is, the analysis of strategy and the construction of models to understand social phenomena–and the theory of individual choice, including how to forecast the behavior of agents who construct models of social phenomena. As a musician, he plays folk in the tradition of Dylan and Guthrie, blues in the tradition of Williamson and McTell, and country in the tradition of Nelson and Cash. Pape is an assistant Professor in the department of Economics at Binghamton University and is a faculty member of the Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo) Research Group.

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Guest Respondents on the Comment Page (in alphabetical order)

Bill Bahng Boyer is a doctoral candidate in music at New York University who is completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.

Maile Colbert  is an intermedia artist with a concentration in sound and video, living and working between New York and Portugal. She is an associated artist at Binaural/Nodar.

Nicholas Knouf is a Ph.D. candidate in information science at Cornell University.

Primus Luta is a writer and an artist exploring the intersection of technology and art; he maintains his own AvantUrb site and is a founding member of the live electronic music collective Concrète Sound System.

Alejandro L. Madrid is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a cultural theorist and music scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition, globalization, and ethnic identity in popular and art music, dance, and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean.

Tara Rodgers is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and a faculty fellow in the Digital Cultures & Creativity program at the University of Maryland. As Analog Tara, she has released electronic music on compilations such as the Le Tigre 12″ and Source Records/Germany, and exhibited sound art at venues including Eyebeam (NYC) and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto).

Jonathan Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics.

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. His latest book, Mp3 The Meaning of a Format comes out this fall from Duke University Press.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2011-2012).

Aaron Trammell is Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out! and a Ph.D. Candidate in Media and Communications at Rutgers University.

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