Sound at AMS/SEM/SMT 2012
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/gvrv9-hfj57
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.
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.
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Featured Image: Mardi Gras 2005, By Robert Garcia, The City Project
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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
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”
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~
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)
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”
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”
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
8:30-10:30am, Music and YouTube: Sound, Media, and Sociality
Session 4-5 SEM A: Astor Grand A
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), Chair
Fabian Holt (Roskilde University, Denmark), “Social Media Video and the Festivalization of Electronic Dance Music in Europe”
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), “Worship on the Web: Building Online Religious Community through Christian Devotional Music Videos”
Patricia G. Lange (California College of the Arts), “In Synch with Lip-Synching: A Riff on Teen Sociality”
Trevor S. Harvey (University of Iowa), “Dulcimerica: Mediating a Musical Community through Video Podcasts”
8:30-10:30am, Musical Propertization in the Digital Age:
Session 4-7 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
From “Piracy” to Ontological Politics
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), Chair
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya”
Aditi Deo (University of Oxford), “Folk Music in the Digital Realm: Public Commons or Cultural Property?”
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), “Pirates of the Caribbean: Music Circulation in Late Socialist Cuba”
Henry Stobart (Royal Holloway, University of London), “Shifting Properties: Ownership, Informality, and the Digital Music Video in Bolivia”
9:00-noon, The City is a Medium
Session 4-16 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Edgewood
Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Chair
Veit Erlmann (University of Texas at Austin), Respondent
Benjamin Tausig (New York University), “The City is Burning: Informal Musical Commerce at Urban Protest Movements”
Tiffany Ng (University of California, Berkeley), “An Instrument of Urban Planning: Bells and the Sonic Remediation of Community Space in the Southeastern United States”
John Melillo (University of Arizona), “Phatic Emphatic: Listening to New York City in Downtown Poetry and Punk”
Peter McMurray (Harvard University), “Heterophony of a Metropolis: Rites of Passage and Contestation Turkish Berlin”
10:45-12:15pm, Feminist Approaches to Music and Sound Technologies: History, Theory, and Practice
Session 4-29 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Sponsored by the Section on the Status of Women (SSW)
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), Chair
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), “Feminist Approaches to Electronic Music and Sound Historiography”
Charity Marsh (University of Regina), “Reluctant Hip Hop Warriors”: Feminist Approaches to Hop Hop Community Projects”
10:45-12:15pm, Intersections of Ethnomusicology with Other Fields
Session 4-31 SEM S: Bayside B
Theresa Allison (University of California, San Francisco), Chair
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson (Brigham Young University), “Has Ethnomusicology Met Its Calling? An Ethnomusicologist’s Response to Biomusicology”
Monique McGrath (University of Toronto), “What Does Ethnomusicology Have to Say to Music Therapy?”
Jeremy Day-O’Connell (Knox College), “‘Motherese’ and Universals of Musical Pitch
10:45-12:15pm, Sounds and Space in New Orleans
Session 4-35 SEM S: Maurepas
Marié Abe (Boston University), Chair
Danielle Adomaitis (Florida State University), “Sonic Fixtures and Drifting Buskers: Soundmarks of New Orleans and the Street Musicians Who Construct Them”
Zarah Ersoff (University of California, Los Angeles), “Treme’s Aural Verisimilitude”
Julie Raimondi (Tufts University), “Music, SEO Agency, and the Social Construction of Space in New Orleans
2:00–6:00pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Outing:
Barataria Preserve Hike
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Animal Renderings: The Library of Natural Sounds
Today we bring you the latest post in SO!’s spring series, Live from the SHC, which follows the new research from the 2011-2012 Fellows of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, who have gathered in the A.D. White House to study “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics.” For the full series, click here. Today poet, scholar, and ecocritic Jonathan Skinner brings us all a treat for spring, so throw open your windows and take a deep listen. –Editor in Chief, JSA
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/6grk7-v6247
This planet is singing 24/7 but are we listening to it? Take out your earbuds, turn down the music and the air conditioning, walk away from the fridge, shut off your engine, open the windows, and tell me what you hear. If you are in the humid parts of the temperate regions, chances are you’ll hear right now, amidst the myriad human sounds, and depending on the time of day, the spring peepers going, the woodcocks peenting and displaying, a grouse drumming, the whistling of cardinals and robins, chickadees countersinging, blackbirds trilling, cawing of crows, blue jays scolding, honking of geese, hooting of an owl or two, woodpeckers drumming, house sparrows chirping (in this case, to a Satie carillon), perhaps some coyotes yapping it up after midnight. Not to speak of wind in branches and leaves, water, thunder and lightning. These are just some of sounds I can pick up, with a bit of careful listening, in and around the relatively urban environment of Ithaca, New York. If you put your ear to the grass, you might hear this astonishing Treehopper communication.
Or maybe you heard these sounds in some music you were listening to, in a movie soundtrack or videogame? Just as we pervade their worlds, animals pervade our environments, and their sounds are used to “render” these environments within the relatively flat dimensions of our media—the way three dimensions of spatial information get “crunched” to the two dimensions of a video game’s display (see 4:00 – 5:20 for a demonstration of Aiden Fry’s “generative birdsong” program below, developed through the analysis and sampling of birdsong as a solution to repetitive sound effects that can diminish the immersive quality of the game). Even the most sophisticated “surround sound” audio must “render” figuratively the environed experience of hearing.
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The next time you watch a movie, listen to some “ambient” music or play a videogame that renders an outdoors environment, imagine subtracting the animal sounds (either literal or evoked) from these media scapes and consider how incompletely rendered the experience would be. A reversal of the effect, as in Gus Van Sant’s use of Hildegard Westerkamp’s “Beneath the Forest Floor” soundscape, to track and underscore the anomie of certain characters through Elephant, his thinly veiled recreation of the Columbine High School tragedy, also proves the rule (note especially the soundtrack from 3:10 – 3:40).
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Greg Budney and Mike Webster explain their dedication to compiling the world’s largest and best quality archive of animal recordings (now in video as well as audio), the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell University, as a responsibility to future acoustic biologists, who may bring tools and concepts to the data we have not remotely conceived. Their mission is first and foremost a scientific one. However, conservation is also high on their list: Budney, an expert recordist, points out how high quality recordings—as of lekking Greater Prairie-Chickens—can be played back into the environment, to promote nesting of endangered populations.
These bioacousticians agree that high quality sound recordings can be a powerful way to interest laypeople in the sounds of the robin in their backyard, and, by extension, in broader issues of conservation. Sounds in the Macaulay Library also are available to the entertainment industry, so that, indeed, myriad animal vocalizations contribute to the renderings of its various media. Licensing fees in turn contribute to the conservation mission of the Library.
Rendering is not so much a matter of reproduction—accurately representing a “real” environment—as of recreating, through a consistency that “completes” the aesthetic experience, the feelings associated with an environment. (Think of the difference in quality between the “finished” HD, surround-sound movie and the behind-the-scenes “special features” on a DVD.) In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, media theorist Michel Chion identifies an important feature of rendering in “materializing sound indices,” noises that help render, in sound and image, a particular “clump of sensations” (112-116).
For instance, spatial depth, in outdoor scenes, is often rendered through the presence of bird song or dogs barking, etc. Or consider the cooing of pigeons that often accompanies the opening of a garret window in a movie set in Paris. Or that ubiquitous red-tailed hawk’s cry indexing a “wild” landscape. The absence or thinness of these indices can be just as helpful to rendering, as when the landscape includes “ethereal, abstract, and fluid” entities: “out of touch” characters in Jacques Tati films or the drawn characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where hollow, lightweight, plastic sounds help us believe that we are indeed seeing (or, as Chion reminds us, “hear-seeing”) cartoon characters (watch from 1:19 – 1:33 for the famous “clang” the drawn Jessica Rabbit makes as she collides with the live action Eddie Valiant).
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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both the book and the film version, deploy effectively the total absence of animal sounds to convey the uncanny complex of feelings bound up in environmental apocalypse—the “silent spring” invoked by Rachel Carson a half century ago in her indictment of the toxic legacy of the chemical industry.
In his study of environmental aesthetics, Ecology Without Nature, ecocritic Timothy Morton faults rendering for perpetuating an “ecomimetic illusion of immediacy,” an “ambient” art that ultimately comes in between us and the life it is supposed to bring us close to (36). Rendering lures us into the “relaxing ambient sounds of ecomimesis,” precisely when we need to hear “the screeching of the emergency brake” (as Morton puts it: “whistling in the dark, insisting that we’re part of Gaia” 187, 196). However, Chion notes that “the disjunctive and autonomist impulse [à la Godard] that predominates in intellectual discourse on the question (‘wouldn’t it be better if sound and image were independent?’) arises entirely from a unitary illusion” that there is “a true unity existing elsewhere” (Audio-Vision 97-98). Such unity is in fact elusive: for instance, it can be difficult to identify the sources of sounds in “nature” (consider the bewildering variety of blue jay calls), while the notion that a sound can on its own invoke more abstract characteristics of its source, especially when it is produced by a nonhuman species, betrays a kind of magical thinking. (Forms of non-western magical thinking actually acknowledge the disjunctive quality of natural sounds by referring, for instance, to “voices in the forest.”) Also, sound is so context dependent, and our listening is so strongly influenced by the conventions of our media, that “sound in itself”can be a very slippery object. Chion notes that we need something like an “auditory analogy of the visual camera obscura” —i.e. the monitoring and recording of soundscapes—to help us listen to “sounds for themselves and to focus on their acoustical qualities” (108).
In a time of mass extinction, how are we to approach the rendering of animal sounds in our mediated environments? Do these sounds have agency? Does listening to and “capturing” animal sounds bring us closer to them, or only lure us, with an illusion of immersion and unity, away from realizing the dark nature of our ecology, and the urgent reforms needed, if we are actually to help animals (does our rendering and consumption of whale song—pace what Songs of the Humpback Whale has done for whale conservation—end up perpetuating the same extractive process that “renders” whale blubber)?
I would say that, so long as we approach these sounds neither as a substitute for, nor as an experience “less than,” the daily practice of listening to our environments, a resource like the Macaulay Library can add immeasurably to our awareness of the diversity, and the vulnerability, of life on Earth. (Another resource worth exploring is the British Library’s Environment & nature sounds archive, especially the collection of early wildlife recordings.) Careful attention to renderings of animal sounds in our media can make us aware of the extent to which we “render” the landscape around us, through selective habits of listening, and open us to the disjunctive, noisy, reverberant, distorted sounds such renderings obscure. (R. Murray Schafer made this point long ago, in his book The Soundscape urging us to listen to noise if we want to defeat it.) Clips posted here, of media using birdsong to render scenes of human violence, state the complexity of our pastoral aesthetics in an exaggerated way, but every day our listening has access to a range of sonic collisions.
Consider the famous recordings of nightingales in Beatrice Harrison’s backyard, to the accompaniment of her cello, as well as to RAF bombers—on Minnesota Public Radio’s Music & Nature. Part of what we will hear when we listen with open ears is our own domination of the soundscape, one that can have concrete implications for the survival of other species (Chris Clark, head of Bioacoustics Research at Cornell, has imaged the way the noise of shipping lanes impacts the acoustic habitat of endangered Right Whales.) How might the infrasonic or ultrasonic vocal communications—of blue whales, elephants, mice and bats, for instance—that operate beyond the range of the naked human ear (but not of our instruments) impact our media environments? The “materializing sound indices” of recordings can be used to return us to the embodied, imperfect natures of these other beings, whose vulnerability, philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests in The Animal That Therefore I Am, it is our own nature to follow.
The more we listen to the environment acousmatically, the better critics we become of our media environments’ often crassly commercial renderings. Many of these sounds (see also some of the recordings collected on the Earth Ear label’s Dreams of Gaia) are simply beautiful, or astonishing—conveying an aesthetic dimension alluded to in veteran nature recordist Bernie Krause’s new book, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. (My concern with a focus on the exotic is that privileging “wild places” might have the effect of devaluing the “not wild,” i.e. where most people live—places nonetheless full of wild creatures—and where we might best develop our listening.) Finally, the more we find ways to render these sounds meaningfully in our own lives, outside patterns of consumption, the better chances are we’ll begin to develop (politically, ethically) meaningful relationships with these other species, species with whom we must collaborate if we want to tend the web of life that so desperately needs our care.
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**Featured Image Credit: Digital Collage Bird Art by Flickr User Peregrine Blue
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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: he has published essays on the poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ronald Johnson, Bernadette Mayer, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson; on Poetries of the Third Landscape, Documentary Poetics, and Poetry Animals; and an ethnographic study of the Tohono O’odham Mockingbird Speech. Skinner’s poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVox, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Press, 2009), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). Skinner’s latest creative project is a book on the urban landscape designs of Frederick Law Olmsted.
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