Sounding Out! Podcast #41: Sound Art as Public Art
This April forum, Acts of Sonic Intervention, explores what we over here at Sounding Out! are calling “Sound Studies 2.0”–the movement of the field beyond the initial excitement for and indexing of sound toward new applications and challenges to the status quo.
Today Salomé Voegelin, treats us to a multimedia re-sonification of the keynote she gave at 2014’s Invisible Places, Sounding Cities conference in Viseu, Portugal, “Sound Art as Public Art,” which revivified the idea of the “civic” as a social responsibility enacted through sound and listening. Available for download here as a podcast is an audio recording of the keynote as well as a transcription of its accompanying score. In this final entry of the series, Vogelin shares her insight about how sound can act as intervention, disruption, and resistance.
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Sound Art as Public Art
Performance Score
Salomé Voegelin
Sit down on a chair
Read: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, pp126-127, line 5 to line 5
Play: Clare Gasson, Thought and Hand 53”
Get up, walk a square around your location, singing each side of the square at a different pitch – step back into the middle of the space and grunt loudly.
Stand
Read: Sol leWitt The Location of a Circle, 1974
Sit
Read: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art pp130-131, line 20 to line 3, 3rd word
Stand
Read: endnoted text [see endnotes below], alternating between life and pre-recorded voice.
Sit
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds, Hearing the Continuum of Sound, pp49-50, line 1 to line 12
Read: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature from Course notes from the Collège de France pp68-69, line 32 to line 17, 7th word
Stand
Read: from soundwords.tumblr.com: The waterjet, April 09, 2013, 09:39am
Read: Patrick Farmer Try I Bark from ‘fire turns its back to me…’ to ‘ i have no desire too name’
Sit
Play: The Red Hook High School Cheerleaders by Jeremy Deller, 2 min excerpt
Stand
Read: Sarah Jackson Silent Running from her collection of poems Pelt
Sit
Play: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marches 2008, Track 2, 3 min excerpt
Read: Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, pp19-21, line 8 to line 6 (with a slight edit), and p55, line 17 to line 31
Play: Simon-Steen Anderson Pretty Sound (Up and Down) for priano, from LP Pretty Sound, 3 min excerpt
Read: Listening to the Stars from Noch (What Matters Now? What can’t you hear?)
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds pp157-158, line 1 to line 34
Play: Eisuke Yanagisawa Ultrasonicscapes track 10 streetlight 2, 3 min excerpt.
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds pp165-166, line 29-4 + p166-167, line 40 line 6 word 6 and pp 168-169, line 33 to line 2, and p174, line 18 to line 34
Stand
Read: credits while playing Salomé Voegelin: exactly 3 minutes
Endnotes
Life voice [lv]: This is a performance of my sonic possibilities in a public context.
Recorded voice [rv]: Sounds invisible mobility makes accessible, thinkabe and sensible, different and pluralized notions of publicness.
lv: My public performance invites you to consider your own public performance in this same context.
rv: The sonic public is a participatory possibility, whose actuality is not a matter of truth and untruth, but of sonic fictions: personal narrations that realize the invisible and conjure the inaudible, rather than settle on what appears to be there visibly and audibly.
lv: Together we make a civic performance – creating an ephemeral exchange of invisible things that reframe our visible form, relationship and organization.
rv: Listening challenges the designation of private and public. It overhears their distinction and does not follow the functional architecture of place and civic purpose but proposes formless and invisible alternatives.
lv: I am performing my private sonic life-world that meets yours in passing, at moments of coincidence, to create not one appreciable entirety, one actuality, but fragmented possibilities of what our shared space is, or could be.
rv: Sound is not necessarily harmonious, nor definitively antagonistic, but generates the space of an agonistic play: no ideal objective guides or precedes the action that it is.
lv: I sang a square and talked a circle.
rv: The public is not a visual concept, a permanent institution and infrastructure, but a transitory practice.
Iv: made room in the visible space for my invisible possibilities
rv: Sound makes apparent the frames, edges and boundaries of what is considered the actual place, and implodes the singularity and permanence of that perception through an invisible duration.
lv: I made an artistic space,
I made a social space
I made a political space
They reveal the limits of actuality, produce possibilities, and hint at the possibility of impossibilities.
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Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010) and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2014). She maintains the blog SoundWords and has curated the exhibition clickanywhere, an online exhibition of spoken and written work. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts at London College of Communication, UAL and has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London University.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
detritus 1 & 2 and V.F(i)n_1&2 : The Sounds and Images of Postnational Violence in Mexico – Luz Maria Sánchez
Standing Up, for Jose – Mandie O’Connell
Sounding Out! Podcast #23: War of the Worlds Revisited – Aaron Trammell
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SO! Amplifies: Mega Ran and Sammus, The Rappers With Arm Cannons Tour
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
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Throughout the month of March, nerdcore MCs Mega Ran (Raheem Jarbo) and Sammus (Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) will be embarking on the “Rappers with Arm Cannons” Tour. Both artists independently based their monikers on two of the most notable video game characters to possess arm cannons, (Mega Man and Samus respectively), but they have since collaborated on several songs and a SoundScan charting Castlevania project, as well as sharing the stage at numerous concert venues and conventions, and releasing individual albums and videos that have received international attention and critical acclaim. Now three years later the two teachers-turned-rappers have decided to take their show on the road alongside rapper and sound engineer Storyville (Matthew Weisse), who has recently joined forces with Mega Ran to release their February 2015 album “Soul Veggies.”
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While at first glance the name of the tour appears a bit tongue-in-cheek, it calls necessary attention to the growing presence of Black nerdcore artists like Mega Ran and Sammus who cast their experiences as people of color against the backdrop of nerd and geek culture. In Mega Ran’s case, this has meant writing verses about his struggle to make sense of his Black nerd identity while growing up amongst a very rough crowd in Philadelphia. For Sammus, being a rapper with an arm cannon has largely meant reconciling her ideas about the lack of diverse representations of Black women in notable movies, games, and cartoons among other media forms.
Click to “pay what you want” to download the new Sammus X Mega Ran track “Gone” in support of “The Rappers With Arm Cannons” Tour: https://sammusmusic.bandcamp.com/track/gone
Both Mega Ran and Sammus began making beats on the Playstation game MTV Music Generator. Since that time Sammus has brought together the production styles of Kanye West, Daft Punk, Björk and various video game composers to produce beats that are rich with video game synths and uniquely chopped samples. Mega Ran has similarly drawn on his love of hip hop artists, such as Redman, Nas, and Busta Rhymes as well as music from video games such as Mega Man, Final Fantasy VII, and River City Ransom.
On Tuesday, March 10th, the tour stopped at Cornell University’s Just About Music center where SO! Editors J. Stoever And Aaron Trammell sat down with the trio for a very frank and open discussion on how to survive and thrive as independent artists in the new music economy. Here’s a choice sample of that conversation:
The tour began on March 5th in NYC and will continue through March 19th with final stops in Austin, TX at this year’s South-by-South-West (SXSW). For full details on tall of the dates visit http://sammusmusic.com/shows-tour-dates/
Mega Ran on Twitter, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, and Megaranmusic.com
Sammus on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, and sammusmusic.com.
Storyville on Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Facebook.
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Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo is a PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Since completing a senior thesis on digital music software, tacit knowledge, and gender under the guidance of Trevor Pinch, she has become interested in pursuing research in the emergent field of sound studies. She hopes to combine her passion for music with her academic interests in technological systems, bodies, politics and practices that construct and are constructed by sound. More specifically she would like to examine the politics surrounding low-income community studios, as well as the uses of sound in (or as) electronic games. In her free time she produces hip hop beats and raps under the moniker Sammus (based on the video game character, Samus Aran, from the popular Metroid franchise).
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Making Music at Studio X: The Identity Politics of Community Studios-Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
SO! Amplifies: Regina Bradley’s Outkasted Conversations-Regina Bradley
Love and Hip Hop: (Re)Gendering The Debate Over Hip Hop Studies— Travis Gosa
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