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 8, 2010  

Check it out: David Means’ “The Knocking”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/sjk3r-tbf34

In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled “The Knocking” (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound–particularly on noise. In a nutshell, the story presents us with two neighbors who don’t like each other from first sight: one who lives upstairs and makes noise all day, and one who lives downstairs and has to cope with the constant influx of sound. What strikes me as interesting is that the narrator, understandably annoyed, describes the sounds coming from his neighbor’s apartment as “knocks.” The story, which aims to give us a look into the sad life of the man downstairs who can’t stand the noises coming from upstairs, actually ends up being a study in noise.

“The Knocking” is all about knocks: knocks as sounds and knocks as noise. The story starts out with a perturbed narrator, annoyed by the sounds emanating from the apartment above him. In the first paragraph–comprised of just two sentences–the sentences seem to flow like sounds floating in the wind. But don’t let the sensation fool you, the noises come off as rough and harsh (or at least that is how the narrator perceives them): “I know, as I wait, that the knocking will begin again, if not in the form of his tapping heel, then as some other kind of knocking: perhaps the sound of the hammer he uses to pound nails…, or the rubbery thud of his printer at work…, or the thump of his mattress hitting the slats.” The narrator admits that the sounds are not knocks per se, but that they became knocks over time due to their “mechanistic, reproduced quality.” Noise is clearly in the ear of the beholder, according to the narrator. However, further down, the narrator shows us a deeper understanding of the knocks: “At some point the sweet, even anachronistic, broom swish switched over to knock mode; not so much the actual sound but, rather, the intent behind the gesture had gone from the act of sweeping to the sound that the act made, so that it was clear to me below that what had started out as a normal cleaning routine had, perhaps in response to my moaning and occasional shouts up at the ceiling between sweeps, shifted to knocking.” The noise is displaced from the listener to the one making the noise; if the intention is to make noise, noise it is. As the story flows he understands the sounds his neighbor is making as more than just annoying rapts; he shows us how the sounds gain meaning via the listener as well as the the person making the noise.

Eventually the sounds become a metaphor for what is going on inside of him. The narrator has come out of a failed marriage, and we find out that before he moved to that apartment, he was married and had children. All that is left is an apartment and a fussy neighbor upstairs. The repetition and the lifelessness of the knocking echo the emptiness of his life. The knocking mocks what is left. This is best illustrated when he tries to explain to himself what happened in his marriage through his theory of love:

“Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone)”

It is one of the most beautiful passages in the story, and does justice to the theme of sound in the story. Love becomes sound, and instead of love at first sight, we have love at first vibration.

This story brought together two of my passions: literature and sound. Although I don’t claim that Means is the first author to focus a story on sounds, he did well by reading in those sounds the lives of the listeners/characters. “The Knocking” is short and enjoyable, but it is also meaningful and deep. I did not know about David Means’ fiction until this issue( here you can see the collections he’s published, and here you can read his latest story in The New Yorker), but after reading this story and noticing his attention to sonic detail, I wonder if his other stories are just as mindful. It’s refreshing to find fiction that attentive to sound, even if it brings back memories of my own noisy neighbors.

Bonus Track: read a brief interview of Means in The New York Times by clicking here.

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Liana Marie Silva

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Check it out: David Means’ “The Knocking”_Silva_2010Download
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