Sound at IASPM-US 2014

For the second weekend in March, the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) will be holding its annual meeting at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Like sound studies, popular music studies is fueled by an interdisciplinary spirit, and many of the questions that currently occupy the popular culture corner of sound studies have much in common with those of us who take the study of music seriously. This year’s conference offers a unique theme, “Music Flows,” that centers around questions of water, flows, and liquidity. The conference theme also offers more expansive ideas to flows, including mobility, embodiment, sonic materialities, and ecology. While the theme may strike some as unconventional, it ends up being an excellent metaphor for those of us who study musical flows in fields that prefer static works and communities over transient ones.

The James Taylor Bridge over Morgan Creek in his native city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Since this is a popular music conference, many of the papers at this meeting take musical texts as their focus (including mine); however, there are still many panels and individual papers that might interest scholars from a sound studies perspective. After all, sound travels better in water than in air, and following that logic, water and sound both feature waves. Indeed, there are papers that take the water waves and sound waves as their inspiration. Compare, for example, SO! guest writer Mack Hagood’s discussion of an early popular recording of water waves against Robin James’s philosophical theorizing about sound waves and Neo-Liberalism in the music of Ludacris. Similarly, many papers take their inspiration from the sounds that come from water or are performed in it: Peter Schultz specifically tackles the sound-design of watery environments in video games, while SO! guest writer Josh Ottum investigates the sounds from the floating garbage island in the middle of the ocean. These papers offer attendees the opportunity to consider the large theoretical consequences of changes to the water and waves in recordings.
Some papers approach water from a perspective focused on materiality and mediation. Craig Eley’s paper offers a historically grounded study of the hydrophone and underwater recording. Peter McMurray’s paper analyzes the problem of making music for watery environments and the challenges of water’s sonic conduciveness. For an athletic perspective on hearing music in the water, Niko Higgins talks about the music that swimmers use in their athletic training. These perspectives on liquid mediation offer a tremendous opportunity to expand sound studies beyond its general dependence on sounds that happen in the open air.
Beyond the more literal takes on the water in music flows, a large portion of the papers have taken their inspiration from the metaphor of social mobility, liquidity, and trade. There are panels and papers that emphasize transnational sonic flows, such as the panel “In and Out of Africa,” and Jason Robinson’s work on recording challenges in a transatlantic jazz collaboration. Two papers in particular deal with the role of African Americans in U.S. diplomatic relations: Darren Mueller’s paper on Dizzy Gillespie as a jazz ambassador, and Kendra Salois’s work on hip-hop diplomacy. Along a similar vein, Yvonne Liao specifically considers ports and their relationship to musical trade in Shanghai’s jazz scene. There is also a paper on the role of music as a social lubricant by Luis-Manuel Garcia that promises to be a real treat.

Megafaun serenades a Chapel Hill, North Carolina crowd, Image by Flickr user abbyladybug
Finally, it is worth mentioning how many papers address sound studies’ long-standing relationship with soundscapes, ecomusicology, and the environment. There is a panel called “Ecologies of Place” with papers on ecologically-minded music from places as far flung as India, Iceland, Appalachian Ohio, and Canadian parks. There is also a panel on “Urban Soundscapes,” including Robert Fry’s paper on sound, music, and branding at a hot spring resort and Mathew Robert Swiatlowski’s paper on the boom box and the Walkman in urban space.
Many in sound studies cite Jonathan Sterne’s critiques of ocularcentrism in cultural criticism. This conference encourages us to think beyond the air and stasis and shift our focus to the possibilities of liquid metaphors in cultural change.
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Featured Image: One of Chapel Hill’s many ponds, at the Outdoor Education Center, Image by Flickr User Kat St Kat
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Kariann Goldschmitt is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New College of Florida and Ringling College of Art and Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA (2009) and was the 2009-2011 Mellon Fellow of Non-Western Music at Colby College in Maine. Her scholarly work focuses on Brazilian music, modes of listening, and sonic branding in the global cultural industries. She has published in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Music, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Luso-Brazilian Review and contributes to the South American cultural magazine, Sounds and Colours.
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“Franklin Street, Chapel Hill” by Wikimedia user Caroline Culler, CC BY 3.0
Friday, March 14

So nice we put it twice, The James Taylor Bridge, Public Domain
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Saturday, March 15

“Cheerleaders, UNC, 1989” by Flickr user North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Sunday, March 16

Chapel Hill’s finest, WUNC, image by Flickr user Keith Weston
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From Mercury to Mars: The Legacy of War of the Worlds: What Happened Here? from Antenna
Our ongoing series on the radio work of Orson Welles, From Mercury to Mars, continues this week on our partner blog Antenna with a post that explores the lack of innovation in American radio and its connection to public radio as an institution.
University of Wisconsin professor and senior radio historian Michele Hilmes explains these connections…
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“Yet what happened to this legacy of innovation in American radio drama that Welles’
career so emphatically marks? We can trace the tradition of creative radio drama forward through the suspense serials of the 1940s and 50s, jump to the 1970s with Himan Brown’s CBS Mystery Theater – and then virtually nothing, certainly not on a regular basis, until we get to the present radio revival …”
[Reblogged from Antenna]
To catch up on our M2M series here are some links.
- Here is “Hello Americans,” Tom McEnaney‘s post on Welles and Latin America
- Here is Eleanor Patterson‘s post on editions of WOTW as “Residual Radio”
- Here is “Sound Bites,” Debra Rae Cohen‘s post on Welles’s “Dracula”
- Here is Cynthia B. Meyers on the pleasures and challenges of teaching WOTW in the classroom
- Here is Kathleen Battles on parodies of Welles by Fred Allen
- Here is Shawn VanCour on the second act of War of the Worlds
- Here is the navigator page for our #WOTW75 collective listening project
- Here is Josh Shepperd’s post, “War of the Worlds and the Invasion of Media Studies”
- Here is Aaron Trammell‘s remarkable mix of the thoughts of more than a dozen radio scholars on War of the Worlds
- Here is our podcast of Monteith McCollum‘s amazing WOTW remix
- Here is “Devil’s Symphony,” Jacob Smith‘s study of the “eco-sonic” Welles
Still to come in our series are works by A. Brad Schwartz, Murray Pomerance, Jennifer Hyland Wang, and Bill Kirkpatrick.
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Sounding Out! Podcast #23: War of the Worlds Revisited
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: War of the Worlds Revisited (Part 1)
SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES
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In case you missed our special “War of the Worlds” listening event, you can listen in again to the first part of our broadcast, featuring more than a dozen prominent radio historians, hosted by Brian Hanrahan (Cornell University), with critical reflections from Shawn VanCour (New York University), Kathleen Battles (Oakland University), and Alex Russo (Catholic University) [Part 1]; Brian Wall (SUNY Binghamton), Paul Heyer (Wilfrid Laurier University), and Tom McEnaney (Cornell University) [Part 2]; Kate Lacey (University at Sussex), Jason Loviglio (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County), Paul Heyer (Wilfrid Laurier University), Damien Keane (SUNY Buffallo), Josh Sheppard (The University of Wisconsin-Madison), and John Cheng (SUNY Binghamton) [Part 3]. Part one focuses on radio in the year 1938, part two focuses on Orson Welles, and part three focuses on the War of the Worlds broadcast itself, the media panics which ensued, and aftermath.
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A producer of this broadcast, Aaron Trammell, is co-founder and multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Sound Bites: Vampire Media in Orson Welle’s Dracula— Debra Rae Cohen
Hello, Americans: Orson Welles, Latin America, and the Sounds of the “Good Neighbor”— Tom McEnaney
Sounding Out! Podcast #6: Spaces of Listening/The Record Shop–Aaron Trammell
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From Mercury to Mars: A Hard Act to Follow: War of the Worlds and the Challenges of Literary Adaptation from Antenna
This week our From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years series begins ramping up for our big event, a listening party / social media experiment, in which we’re asking all of our fans and readers to listen to Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio play at the same time and respond to it on social media with the hashtag #WOTW75, beginning at 8:00 pm Eastern. On that date SO! Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, SO! Multimedia Editor Aaron Trammell, producer Nick Rubenstein, Binghamton Cinema Professor Monteith McCollum and his “Performative Processes” class, and BU’s Radio Drama Division will offer a broadcast from 90.5 FM WHRW radio in Binghamton, NY (and online) both before and after the play.
Remember to tune in to this blog on that date, and we’ll have lots of links and resources ready to help you participate. Organize your listening party now! Follow our project on Facebook and Twitter, too.
But first! Check out the most recent entry to the M2M series by contributor and media historian Shawn VanCour …
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“What is left to tell after the end of the world, and who is there to tell it? In his Mercury Theater signoff on October 30, 1938, producer and star Orson Welles boasted that the evening’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast had “annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the C.B.S.” While these scenes of otherworldly invasion from the program’s opening 40-minute act have been a source of much discussion, its 20-minute closing act is seldom addressed and stands in stark contrast to the fast action and stylistic innovation of Act I …”
[Reblogged from Antenna]
Click here to read VanCour’s exceptional essay on the second act of the “War of the Worlds,” and what made it – from a stylistic point of view – perhaps more controversial than the first.
This is the sixth entry in our ongoing series on Welles and radio. Want to catch up with the series? See below.
- Here is “Hello Americans,” Tom McEnaney‘s post on Welles and Latin America
- Here is Eleanor Patterson‘s post on editions of WOTW as “Residual Radio”
- Here is “Sound Bites,” Debra Rae Cohen‘s post on Welles’s “Dracula”
- Here is Cynthia B. Meyers on the pleasures and challenges of teaching WOTW in the classroom
- And … Here is Kathleen Battles on parodies of Welles by Fred Allen.
See you on the 30th! — nv
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