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November 15, 2010  

Sound at ASA 2010

A Cast of the Statue of Liberty’s Ear

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/aaymp-6bn04

Normally you would see a brand-new post from Sounding Out! on a Monday like this one, but this week I am traveling to the American Studies Association Conference in San Antonio, Texas, where I will be speaking on what promises to be an excellent sound studies roundtable on Thursday morning. I am excited to be part of a growing sound studies presence at ASA and I would love to facilitate an even larger auditory footprint. So as to bring the conference experience a little closer to those that cannot be down in TX, I will be. . .

A) posting my opening gambit to my roundtable “Huhh!..Hahh!..Huhh!..Hahh!..: Sound, Working, Chain” Thursday evening and welcoming your thoughts and responses

B) Tweeting real-time sound-related thoughts and ideas inspired by the panels I attend at our twitterfeed: http://twitter.com/soundingoutblog; follow us for the scoop!

& C) Listing all of the sound related panels below–which are full of lovely hotlinks to full abstracts. If you are planning to attend ASA, please come give these folks a listen. If you can’t make it, participate via Sounding Out!

See you Thursday! If I somehow missed you, please let me know!: jsa@binghamton.edu

 

Access the full searchable program here: This years’s theme is “Crisis, Chains, and Change.”

Thursday, 11/18

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Lightnin’” Washington, an African American prisoner, singing with his group in the woodyard at Darrington State Farm, Texas, Alan Lomax, photographer, April, 1934

 

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 206B

Chair: Bryan Wagner (University of California, Berkeley (CA))

Panelist: Roshanak Kheshti (University of California, San Diego (CA))

Panelist: Shana Redmond (University of Southern California (CA))

Panelist: Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College in Pennsylvania (PA))

Panelist: Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (State University of New York, Binghamton (NY)

Panelist: Tara Rodgers (McGill University)

Abstract:

In his hit song “Chain Gang” sledge hammer clangs against railroad tie as Sam Cooke’s honey-dipped voice narrates a sonic scene in which men “moanin’ their lives away” lose themselves in a choral anguish, each grunt metronomically marking the passage of servile time, their spirits carried off to an imagined homeland inhabited by loved ones, a place of possibility and hope. “Give me water, I’m thirsty, my work is so hard” the collective body reveals a fundamental yearning for a material and spiritual quenching that is not yet. Riding the refrain “Huhh!..Hahh!..Huhh!..Hahh!,” the working men carry on in a sonic meditation, hovering just above their toiling bodies in sound worlds of redemptive, libratory possibility.

Cooke’s evocative lyrics and guttural howls along with his bands rhythmic precision set to record in an RCA studio by Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore’s production skills represents a synergy of sonic performances and events. This panel brings together scholars working on similar synergies in which sound reaches just beyond its boundaries exceeding its perceptual mode to create contact with other worlds, times, places and possibilities. Whether in the context of commodity chains, chains of signification, busking for change or disruptions to the chain of command, sound can function as medium, message, massage, weapon, prison and fantasy. This panel explores the poetics of sound, examining its capacity as a vehicle of time travel, distraction, alarm, liberation, restraint and pleasure.

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 4:00pm – 5:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214C

Licensed Begging: Mayor La Guardia’s Street Music Ban and Noise Abatement as Labor Surveillance: Robert Hawkins (Saint Louis University (MO))

A Short History of American Wiretapping: David Suisman (University of Delaware (DE))

Anarchy in the U.S.A.: Immigrant Punk, Hybridity and the Incarceral Politics of American National Identity: Megan Turner (University of California, San Diego (CA))

Double Voices of Musical Censorship: Martin Scherzinger (New York University (NY))

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 18 – 4:00pm – 5:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B

Chair: Barry Shank (Ohio State University, Columbus (OH))

Paisagem Útil : Modernity and the Nation in Brazilian Popular Song: Brendan McGillicuddy (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN))

The Punk Event: The CBGB’s Scene and Avant-Garde Aesthetics: Shaun Cullen (University of Virginia (VA))

Can’t Quit Your Day Job: The Liminal Space of the Semiprofessional Musician: Colin Helb (Elizabethtown College (PA))

Comment: Barry Shank (Ohio State University, Columbus (OH))

Friday, 11.19

 

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 201

Chair: Ben V. Olguin (University of Texas, San Antonio (TX))

The Sounds of Shackles: African American Work Songs on Texas Prison Farms : James Deutsch (Smithsonian Institution)

Promises, Problems, and Cultural Crises: The Reverberating Sounds from Gideon v. Wainwright: Mary Seliger (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA))

Radio Raheem’s Broken Boom-Box: Artistic and Musical Responses to Police Brutality and Racial Violence: Johanna Almiron (University of Hawaii, Manoa (HI)

Comment: Ben V. Olguin (University of Texas, San Antonio (TX))

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214C

 

Chair: Ulrich Adelt (University of Wyoming (WY))

The Ethical Vision of “el Adios Tejas” in El Corrido Pensilvanio Jaime Javier Rodriguez (University of North Texas (TX))

Making Face, Making Space: The Aesthetics of Brown Identity in Jim Mendiola’s Girl In A Coma Universe Alexandra Mendoza Covarrubias (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN))

Asian American Hip Hop and the Inter-national Christopher Ramos (University of Florida (FL))

Comment: Alexandra Vazquez (Princeton University (NJ))

 

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 12:00pm – 1:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 206A

Chair: Lawrence La Fountain Stokes (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI))

Sonic Crisis: Girl in a Coma: Deborah R. Vargas (University of California, Irvine (CA))

Si tú creías que yo no venía: NuYoRico, Salsa, and Puerto Rican “National” Culture: Marisol Negrón (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Censúrarme: Underground Rap and Neoliberal Policing in Puerto Rico: Marisol LeBrón (New York University (NY))

Sexing the Game: Black Women and the Sexual Politics of Hip-Hop Pornography:Mireille Miller-Young (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA))

Comment: Lawrence La Fountain Stokes (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI))

 

Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 2:00pm – 3:45pm

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 203B

Chair: Aaron Lecklider (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Jazz Subjectivities in Neoliberal Culture: Dale Edward Chapman (Bates College (ME)

Where’s the Gig At?: Taking Missions and Creating Space with Punk Rock on the Greater Eastside: Jonathan Daniel Gomez (University of California, Santa Barbara (CA)

Comment: Aaron Lecklider (University of Massachusetts, Boston (MA))

Saturday, 11.20

Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 10:00am – 11:45am

Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 207A

 

Chair: Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas (KS))

Fine Art/Black Art: Roy DeCarava and the Jazz Image: Benjamin Cawthra (California State University, Fullerton (CA))

Monterey and Ray: The Impact of the Jazz Image on American Consumerism: Heather Pinson (Robert Morris College (PA))

Impressions of America in the Tropics: Jazz, Creolization, and the Racial Imagination: Jerome Camal (Washington University in St. Louis (MO))

Comment: Sherrie Tucker (University of Kansas (KS))

Sound-Related Individual Papers:

Receptions:

Journal of Popular Music Studies | JPMS

Friday, November 19 · 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Location Zinc Bar and Bistro (in the Charles Courtyard)

207 N. Presa, San Antonio, TX

Come meet the new editorial team of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and learn more about JPMS. Gnosh, drink, mingle, debate the merits of “Like a G6.”

Editors in Chief:Gustavus Stadler (Haverford) and Karen Tongson (USC)
Associate Editors: Anthony Kwame Harrison (Virginia Tech)Wayne Marshall (M.I.T.)David Suisman (U of Delaware) | book reviewsAlexandra Vazquez (Princeton) | performance reviews Eric Weisbard (U of Alabama)Mina Yang (USC)

SnacksOpen bar for the first hour (or until our tab is full) and cash bar. Good Company!

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Jennifer Lynn Stoever

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Sound at ASA 2010_Stoever_2010Download
November 1, 2010  

Remix the Libraries / Collaborative Listening

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/fb9fr-hpg35

We’re all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even. At first you try to bottle it in, but what starts as a snigger eventually manifests itself as boisterous laughter. You’re making noise, then: SHHHHHHHHHHHH! Libraries, for better or worse, are quiet spaces, but they are also important third-spaces, social forums and purveyors of an all-ages educational opportunity. Even though we imagine libraries to be quiet, they often distribute music. This blog entry suggests a musical intervention of sorts, a reconstitution of the library as a space of noise. A site of collaboration in the public imaginary where conversations can take place over a splice of Iggy Pop and Tchaikovsky fading from one century to the next. This is no pipe dream, it is a radical rethinking of what tomorrow’s library could be within the parameters of virtual space.

This idea is nothing new, Library Information Science scholars like Brenda Dervin have been arguing since the seventies that libraries should be configured as sites of community and activity, not as tombs of information. There is a fundamental tension still; libraries are a space of study, and most users are more comfortable reading in a quiet space. Virtual spaces offer a way out of this problematic by allowing for a second acoustic space for users to listen in, a space which can be conveniently tethered to social networking software, like Facebook. I am arguing, along with my friend Nathan Graham, that libraries are the ideal setting through which to stage a new social platform of participatory and collaborative listening. Using emergent tools from social media platforms, users can cobble lists for shared virtual listening (complete with edited audio clips) and discuss them in a virtual forum. Because of the library’s institutional history as an educational space, these locally hosted forums can stage a strong argument for collaborative listening as fair use, an integral part of the 21st century library.

Right now this idea is just a seed: we are thinking of the platform, its potentials and its restrictions. Notably, in a not so discreet attempt to get feedback from the Sounding Out! reader base, I want to further entertain the idea of collaborative listening. Collaborative listening is a more interactive form of collective listening – it implies that a conversation between listeners is taking place. Some physical spaces of collaborative listening could be the living room while a record spins on a turntable, the classroom where a group of students discuss a song, a subway train where two people share MP3 earbuds, a car in a parking lot surrounded by kids all listening to its stereo, or even Youtube and Last.fm where people often leave comments about songs in the forum below. It is important to consider open spaces which can push against the impending corporate monetization of music sharing and cloud computing as Patrik Wikstrom establishes in his 2010 book, The Music Industry. Bringing this conversation to libraries helps to smash our prejudice of the library as a tomb of knowledge, it opens up the space and facilitates conversation between a greater breadth of citizens. Hopefully, this platform will help transform the library into a open source hub of conversation and collaboration.

So let us listen silently with earbuds in, to the libraries who might channel noise through the internet, a fantasy/testimony to the hopeful sounds of tomorrow.

Aaron Trammell

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Remix the Libraries : Collaborative Listening_Trammell_2010Download
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