Sound at SCMS 2015
Each March one brave Sounding Out! author takes on the task of wading through the catalog of the annual conference of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), to produce a curated guide for scholars interested in sound and its intersection with media. For several years now, SCMS has been both widening its intellectual scope and becoming one of the primary venues for scholars working in sound, and so making sense of the rich and noisy expansion of the field in this context takes a pretty keen ear.
This year we are extremely happy that that ear belongs to Alyxandra Vesey of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Vesey is not only a leading feminist sound theorist, a radio host, and an editor at our peer website Antenna, but she is also one of the people behind the recent special issue of Velvet Light Trap on Sound, which is sure to become a landmark in the field in years to come.
We asked her to begin with some thoughts on what this year’s offerings at the Montreal conference (held March 25 to 29) tell us about sound scholarship these days. Some food for thought for conference attendees as they contemplate the best place for an oven-warm Montreal bagel on a cold winter morning, or work up the courage to try out some rusty French in la belle province …
— Special Editor Neil Verma
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In a recent essay for this site, Robin James situated Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful Twitter campaign within larger histories of patriarchal conventions that moderate “women’s literal and metaphoric voices to control their participation in and affect on society, ensuring that these voices don’t disrupt a so-called harmoniously-ordered society” (2015).
That line came back to me as I began assembling a list of relevant panels, workshops, presentations, and events for sound studies scholars at this year’s SCMS Conference. Of course, the field of film and media studies has been concerned about the voice since the works of Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman, Michele Hilmes and Roland Barthes, many of whose ideas have been revived in recent years, including in a recent issue of Velvet Light Trap, which pursued the voice through a variety of contexts.
But that legacy alone can’t explain the diversity of interest in the subject at SCMS this year; Montreal’s conference might signal the year of the voice in media studies.
Wednesday’s itinerary features “Hearing Voices, Songs, and Speech.” The panel is chaired by Kyle Stevens, who will also present research on the functions of voice-over in representations of suicide and women’s sexuality. Dolores McElroy’s research on Judy Garland, Patrik Sjoberg’s exploration of documentaries’ dubbing and lip sync practices, and Liz Greene’s work on pop music’s signification of middle-aged nostalgia rounds out the proceedings. On Saturday, “The Voice in Transition” includes presentations from chair Jennifer Fleeger, Sarah Wright, Tom Whittaker, and Christine Ehrick on opera in Italian film, silent cinema, dubbing in Spanish film, and Niní Marshall’s film comedies. “Hear and There: The Politics of Sound” include two compelling presentations: Cassie Blake and Tessa Idlewine’s work on female voiceover in theatrical trailers and Allison McCracken’s discussion on auditions and essentialism on NBC’s The Voice.
Heightened interest in podcasting also appears to be symptomatic of interest in the voice. The first day of the conference includes an entire panel on the subject. Chaired by Andrew Bottomley, “Podcasting: A Decade into the Life of a ‘New’ Medium” includes presentations from Brian Fauteux on podcast aesthetics and satellite radio, Andrew Salvati on historiography in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, and Kelli Marshall on WTF host Marc Maron.
However, scholarly inquiry around podcasts may have as much to do with the interest in radio and the medium’s extensions online. On Thursday, Doron Galili and Gabriel Paletz will chair “A Paragon of Intermedial Adaptation: The War of the Worlds in Radio, Film, and Social Media,” exploring the program’s long afterlife alongside a co-authored paper by Neil Verma and Jennifer Stoever and respondent Timothy Corrigan. This event occurs simultaneously with a workshop on radio production cultures chaired by Bottomley and featuring participants Shawn VanCour, Tom McCourt, and David Uskovich. Friday afternoon winds down with a workshop chaired by Jason Loviglio entitled “The Problem of the Radio Canon” that includes Debra Rae Cohen, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, and Elena Razlogova. And on Saturday Jennifer Wang will chair “Fringe Time: Gender and Crossover Programming in the U.S. Radio-TV Transition” with presentations on soap opera’s transitional moment, ethnicity and diet-oriented programming, and discourses around liveness in wrestling from Elana Levine, Jennifer Lynn Jones, and Kate Newbold.
Saturday’s radio studies panels also touch on three other areas of interest for sound studies scholars: technological affordances, historical interventions, and identity politics. To that first point, Wednesday includes Tim Anderson’s presentation on musicians and the professional economies of social networking and Andrew deWaard’s discussion on big data’s influence over ownership in the recording industries. Saturday evening’s “Stream Engines: Streaming Services and Media Distribution” promises to deliver some compelling original research as well. Jeremy Morris and panel chair Devon Powers will co-present a paper on curation and digital music services. Eric Harvey will explore how streaming services become sites of commerce, an extension of his and Maura Johnston’s “Loose Change” series for Pitchfork.
In terms of historiography, Wednesday’s “Music Screens, Music Stars, Music Scenes” is at the top of my list. Chaired by Charlotte Howell, who will also present original research on Atlanta’s public access program The American Show, the panel includes Kristen Alfaro’s work on the Fales Library’s nightclubbing collection, Matt Stahl’s research on royalty reform for R&B artists in the mid-1980s, and Brad Stiffler’s study on TV Party and cable access in the 1970s.
Saturday afternoon includes “Historicizing Music and Transmedia” with presentations from Kyle Barnett, Kevin John Bozelka, chair Landon Palmer, and myself on Jazz Age-era media convergence, post-war publishing and recording practices, The Beatles’ relationship with United Artists, and playlist production as extensions of feminist activism. During that time, Morgan Sea of Tranzister Radio will also participate in a panel with Alexandra Juhasz on trans women’s AIDS media activism. If I could be at two places at once, I would.
This brings us back to questions of identity and how sound signifies larger representational strategies. On Thursday, Jack Curtis Dubowsky chairs “Sound Tracks,” which features presentations from Monique Bourdage, Carl Laamanen, and Rembert Hueser about gender and taste on Playboy after Dark, Her and acousmêtre, the music of La Chinoise, and queer musical signification. I’m also looking forward to seeing Ryan Powell’s presentation on “Queer Aurality in Seventies Gay Art Porn.” Thursday’s panels conclude with “Screening Instability: Genders, Genres, and Soundscapes of Cinematic Modernization in 1960s Mexico,” which includes Brian L. Price’s work on rock ‘n’ roll films in the country, chair Francisco Flores-Cuante’s analysis of masculinities in Viento Negro, and Carolyn Fornoff’s discussions on musical interludes. And on Friday, I plan to attend “She Bop on Screen: Girls, Popular Music, and Visual Media” with original research from Mary Kearney, Norma Coates, Morgan Blue, and Diane Pecknold on the gendering of post-war teen media, the Disney Channel and pop girlhood, and tween pop in the public sphere.
Finally, there are a number of special events for sound scholars to enjoy. Those interested in sound’s immersive potential should take time out on Friday night to visit the Satosphere Dome, which harnesses the potential of 360-degree screen projections, complex speaker system, and environmental sound to place visitors within a large-scale work of art. The official meeting of the Sound Studies Special Interest group (SSSIG) is Wednesday, 3/25, from 2-3:45pm in Les Voyageurs, Lobby Level. The official meeting of the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group (RSSIG) will be Saturday, 3/28, from 9:00-10:45 pm, in Les Voyageurs 2, Lobby Level. In addition to SIG business, the RSSIG will also share an update from the Radio Preservation Task Force and will host award-Winning WireTap producer Mira Burt-Wintonick, who will present ideas on storytelling and sound design in the golden age of podcasting. How do you make your stories stand out in a sea of audio content? What’s different about producing for radio vs. podcasts? How do you create a signature sound? Part listening party, part discussion, this session aims to explore a variety of new sonic trends and possibilities in radio production.
But considerations for the voice also lead us to listen for silences and absences. In that regard, I’m reminded of Neil Verma’s desire “to see future presenters using sound in innovative ways to think about objects and events well outside the perimeter of sound studies, drawing experimental modes of listening in to the conference experience and challenging how scholarship itself is fashioned and displayed” at the end of his “Sound at SCMS 2013” post. This appeal brings to mind Pauline Oliveros’ concept of deep listening, which describes how the music heard in a live or recorded context cannot be reduced to composition without critical attention toward the intersection of producers, listeners, and their shared environment (Rodgers 2010). Such interests seem to influence certain panels’ and participants’ work, particularly “Historicizing Technical Standards and Practices in Film Sound,” “Sounding the Interactive Documentary: Non-fiction, New Media, and the Problem of Immersion,” and James Deaville’s “Music and Sound in Film Trailers: A Preliminary Ethnographic Study of Producers and Consumers.”
Yet I wonder how we could harness sound as a resource for developing pre-existing scholarly approaches and fields. How might we “use sound” in production and industry studies research not only of radio, but in scholarship around other areas and sectors where the image still has primacy? What can sound teach us about precarity and other bedrock concepts within those discourses?
Furthermore, how can we “use sound” as a political intervention? As a field, we know how to analyze sound for the purposes of academic critique. But sound’s relationship to activism is underrepresented at this conference. I’m heartened by Morgan Sea and Jonathan Sterne’s participation in workshops on trans women’s media activism and disability studies. But I want consideration for how to use sound as resources to challenge institutions and ideologies that advance the violent force of intersectional discrimination, civil rights violations, widening class division, surveillance, eroding labor rights, and geopolitical conflict.
In addition, how can we “use sound” to teach? Wednesday concludes with “Participatory Pedagogy” a workshop and networking event about issues related to teaching gender and media. How can we use sound not only to enter into discussions amongst ourselves, but as a resource in the classroom?
Nick Couldry argues that the role of the voice hinges upon the cultural and political value assigned to it, which “involves particular conditions under which voice as a process is effective, and how broader forms of organization may subtly undermine or devalue voice as a process” (2). A number of presentations, panels, and workshops take up the voice as a resource for inquiry. Others will be raising them to ask questions of sound, music, and aurality’s influence in shaping media technologies, texts, representational strategies, and reception practices. And, as always, there are silences and absences we must recognize and address.
Let’s listen. Let’s raise our voices as well.
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Alyxandra Vesey is a feminist media scholar who uses industry and production studies approaches to explore the relationship(s) between gender, labor, and music. Her dissertation analyzes identity and music-based intermediary practices in post-network television. Her work has appeared in Antenna, Flow, In Media Res, The Moving Image, Cinema Journal, Studies in French Cinema, and Saturday Night Live and American TV. She is also an editor for Antenna and The Velvet Light Trap. As an extension of her scholarship, she is also a contributor to Bitch Magazine, a volunteer for Girls Rock Camp Madison, and the host of WSUM 91.7 FM’s “Feminist Music Geek Presents…”
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Featured image: “Feux d’artifice au port du vieux Montréal” by Flickr user Emmanuel Huybrechts, CC BY 2.0
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“Queen Elizabeth” by Flickr user Robert Anthony Provost, CC BY 2.0
Jump to WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 2015
Jump to THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2015
Jump to FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2015
Jump to SATURDAY, MARCH 28, 2015
Jump to SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2015
WEDNESDAY, March 25
Session A 10 – 11:45 a.m.
A11. Sound and Music
Chair: Michael Baumgartner, CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY
Ian Kennedy, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY, “Visual Music and the Enactive Theory of Musical Perception”
Mark Durrand, SUNY-UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, “On Seeing and Hearing in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)”
Summer Kim Lee, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “‘Too Much Exposure’: The Paranoia of Race in Gothic Orientalism”
Michael Baumgartner, CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY, “Expanding the Horizon on Film Music Studies: Jean-Luc Godard’s Use of Music in His Films as a Counter-model to the Music in the Mainstream Film Tradition”
Session C 2:00 – 3:45 p.m.
C1. The Spoilage of America Garbage, Junk, and Audiovisual Noise in US Film and TV
Chair: Allison Rittmayer, NORTHWESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA
Michael Rowin, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, “Noise and Spectatorship in Lynch’s Films”
Tania Darlington, SANTA FE COLLEGE, “From Hill Street to Farmington: The Station House as Symbol of Urban Neglect in Television Police Procedurals”
Jacob Agner, UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI, “Salvaging The Counselor: Watching Cormac McCarthy’s Really Trashy Movie”
Allison Rittmayer, NORTHWESTERN STATE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA, “‘Deswamped and Denuded, and Derivered’: Some Aspects of the Southern Gothic in Rural Noir Landscapes”
C11. Hearing Voices, Songs, and Speech
Chair: Kyle Stevens, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Dolores McElroy, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, “In Extremis: An Inspirational Reading of Judy Garland and The Man That Got Away”
Patrik Sjoberg, KARLSTAD UNIVERSITY, “Your Tongue in My Mouth: Lip Synch, Dubbing, Ventriloquism, and the Othering of Voice in Documentary Media”
Liz Greene, DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY, “Listening, Singing, and Dancing to Pop Songs in Film: The Sound of Middle-aged Nostalgia”
Kyle Stevens, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, “‘I Had No Thoughts at All’: Voice-over, Suicide, and Women’s Sexuality”
Session D 4:00 – 5:45 p.m.
D11. Music Screens, Music Stars, Music Scenes
Chair: Charlotte Howell, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Kristen Alfaro, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “Screens of Punk, Punks of Screen: Video History and the Nightclubbing Collection at the Fales Library, New York University”
Matt Stahl, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “We Have Paid a Price to Sing This Music: Aging R&B Stars’ Struggle for Reparations and Royalty Reform in the US Recording Industry, 1984–2004”
Brad Stiffler, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, “Anti-antinetwork TV: TV Party and the (Un)popular Avantgarde on 1970s Cable Access”
Charlotte Howell, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, “Symbolic Capital and Cable Access: Production Discourse of The American Music Show”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
D18. Podcasting: A Decade into the Life of a “New” Medium
Chair: Andrew Bottomley, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Brian Fauteux, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, “Blog Radio: Satellite Radio and the Aesthetics of Podcasting”
Andrew Salvati, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, “Podcasting the Past: Historiography and Interactivity in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History”
Kelli Marshall, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, “Transmedia Storytime with Your Host Marc Maron”
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session E 6:00 – 7:45 p.m.
E11. Hear and There: The Politics of Sound
Chair: Allison McCracken, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY
Jim Knippling, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI, “Vicissitudes of Normativity in Non-diegetic Film Music: 1940–1975”
Tim Bell, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “White Jazz: Music and Fantasies of English Modernity in The Avengers (1961–69)”
Cassie Blake and Tessa Idlewine, ACADEMY FILM ARCHIVE, “Better Seen than Heard: The Anomaly of Female Voiceover in Theatrical Trailers”
Allison McCracken, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, “Blind Auditions and Vocal Politics: Enacting and Exposing Vocal Essentialism on NBC’s The Voice”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Wednesday Individual Papers of Interest
A5. Asha Tamirisa, BROWN UNIVERSITY, “Aurality, Virtuality, and the Feminization of Technological Space in Her”
A10. Lindsay Affleck, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES, “‘100 Dollars a Day Plus Expenses’: Richard Diamond as Radio Shamus and Hollywood Telefilm Production”
A17. Anna Dimitrova, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, “Polyphonic Soundscape in the Dardenne Brothers’ Film Lorna’s Silence”
A18. Tim Anderson, OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY, “Time for Brand Practice: Networking Finances and the ‘Social Musician’”
C6. Kara Fagan, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, “Dancing on Ice, Falling out of the Gender Script: Sonja Henie’s 20th Century Fox Musicals and the Feminization of Figure Skating”
Spring-Serenity Duvall, SALEM COLLEGE, “When Gen X Icons Grow Up: Celebrity, Aging, and (Trans) national Canadian Identity in the Careers of Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan”
D5. Veronica Fitzpatrick, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, “The Also at Work in Every Intended Something: Belief, Belonging, Sound of My Voice, the East”
D12. Joseph Pfender, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “The Lifespan of Circuits: Cinematic Experimentalism in the Chaotic Music of Louis and Bebe Barron”
D16. Rachel Kahn and Marc Rose, SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM AND UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH, “Music Video Art House: An Auteurist Study of the Music Video Production Company”
E12. Jing (Jamie) Zhao, CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, “Problematizing a ‘Desirable’ Queer Media Culture: A Study of the Chinese Reality Talent Shows Super Girls, The Voice of China, and Your Face Sounds Familiar”
E20. Andrew deWaard, University of California-Los Angeles: “New Gatekeeper Same as the Old Gatekeeper: Big Data, Big Content, and the Continued Concentration of Ownership in the Music Industry”
“MetrOoo Montréal” by Flickr user Éole Wind, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
THURSDAY, March 26
Session F 9:00 – 10:45 a.m.
F11. Composing Narratives: The Role of Music in Film and Television
Chair: Paula Musegades, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Paula Musegades, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, “The Sounds of Shangri-La: Romantic Exoticism in Lost Horizon”
Sheri Chinen Biesen, ROWAN UNIVERSITY, “Blues, Smoke, and Shadows: Jazz in ‘Musical’ Noir Films”
Reba Wissner, MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY, “‘I Am Big—It’s the Pictures that Got Small’: Franz Waxman’s Scores for the Big and Small Screens: Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Twilight Zone’s ‘The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine’ (1959)”
Georgia Luikens, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, “Singing Suburbia, Seeing Suburbia: Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and the Operatic Teleplay”
Session G 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
G7. A Paragon of Intermedial Adaptation: The War of the Worlds in Radio, Film, and Social Media
Chair: Doron Galili, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY
Co-Chair: Gabriel Paletz, PRAGUE FILM SCHOOL
Gabriel Paletz, PRAGUE FILM SCHOOL, “Book to Broadcast and across Media: Orson Welles’s Strategies of Adaptation”
Doron Galili, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY, “War of the Worlds, Mass Media Panic, and the Coming of Television”
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, SUNY-UNIVERSITY AT BINGHAMTON, “Invading Auditory Practice: On the War of the Worlds and #WOTW75”
Respondent: Timothy Corrigan, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
G12. Sound Tracks
Chair: Jack Curtis Dubowsky, ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY
Monique Bourdage, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, “‘You Don’t Appreciate True Musical Genius’: Negotiating Gender and Musical Taste on Playboy after Dark”
Carl Laamanen, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, “Her and the Technological Acousmêtre”
Rembert Hueser, GOETHE UNIVERSITY FRANKFURT, “Easy Listening in Godard’s La Chinoise”
Jack Curtis Dubowsky, ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY, “Queer Monster Music”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
G21. Workshop: Sound Work Radio Production Cultures
Chair: Andrew Bottomley, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Workshop Participants:
Shawn VanCour, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Tom McCourt, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
David Uskovich, ST. EDWARD’S UNIVERSITY
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session H 1:00 – 2:45 p.m.
H12. Historicizing Cinema’s Sounds and Color
Chair: Andrew Horton, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA
Benjamin Wright, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, “The House that Zimmer Built: Romantic Minimalism and Group Style in Contemporary Film Music”
Julie Hubbert, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, “Records, Repertoire, and Rollerball (1975): The Hi-Fi Movement and the New Hollywood Soundtrack”
John Belton, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, “Man, God, and Kodachrome: The Beginnings of a Color Vernacular”
Session I 3:00 – 4:45 p.m.
I11. Historicizing Technical Standards and Practices in Film Sound
Chair: Katherine Quanz, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY
Michael Slowik, SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY, “The Curious Case of Myrna Loy: Voice, Ethnicity, Impersonation, and Early Synchronized Sound Technology”
Eric Dienstfrey, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “Prints and the New Power Regulations: New Data on the 1938 Academy Curve”
Katherine Quanz, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, “The Aesthetic Impact of the National Film Board’s Sound Technology After 1956”
Kevin Donnelly, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON, “Progressive Rock, Technology, and Film in the 1970s”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session J 5:00 – 6:45 p.m.
J11. Screening Instability Genders, Genres, and Soundscapes of Cinematic Modernization in 1960s Mexico
Chair: Francisco Flores-Cuautle, WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY
Brian L. Price, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, “Rock and Roll Films and the Development of Mexican Counterculture”
Francisco Flores-Cuautle, WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Hyperbolic Masculinity and Effeminacy in Viento Negro (Dark Wind)”
Carolyn Fornoff, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, “Musical Interludes in Mexican Melodrama: Crafting a Sonic Space of Exclusion”
Ignacio Sanchez Prado, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS, “A Hero and the Monsters of Modernity: Wrestler Cinema as Popular Cosmopolitanism”
Respondent: Sergio de la Mora, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-DAVIS
Special Event 7:30 p.m.
Wind from the Middle East: An Evening of Music and Film
Location: La Vitrola, 4602 Boulevard Saint-Laurent
The Middle East Caucus presents an evening of entertainment and discussion, featuring a performance by local Montreal musicians Sam Shalabi (playing oud) and Stefan Christoff (on electric guitar). Following the musical performance, there will be a presentation by Negar Mottahedeh, Associate Professor of Literature at Duke University, and author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Professor Mottahedeh’s talk is titled “Le Vent Nous Portera: of lovers possessed, times entangled, and bodies carried away,” and will be accompanied by a video projection.
Metro: Station Laurier or a short taxi ride from the conference hotel.
Sponsored By: Middle East Caucus and supported by SCMS
Thursday Individual Papers of Interest
F6. Zachary Campbell, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “The Audiovisual Otherwise: Valences of Media as Political Figurations”
F7. Denise Mok, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, “Transnational Agencies and Auras: Performance and Star Power in Transatlantic Film Performances in Early Sound Cinema”
F8. Theo Stojanov, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, “Manufactured Soundscapes: Recycled Media, Sound Archives, Materiality”
G10. Anupama Kapse, QUEENS COLLEGE-CUNY, “Autobiographies of Dissent: Memories of Screen Acting in the Early Sound Film”
G11. Colin Burnett, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS, “The Vernacular of Rhythm: How the Language of Postwar Film Culture Elaborated on a Musical Analogy”
H8. Jane Stadler, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND, “Sonic Disturbance: Film, Phenomenology, and the Threshold of Acoustic Experience”
H11. Anne Jerslev, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, “David Lynch and Haptic Audio-Visuality in Crazy Clown Time”
H18. Ryan Powell, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “Queer Aurality in Seventies Gay Art Porn”
I4. James Deaville, CARLETON UNIVERSITY, “Music and Sound in Film Trailers: A Preliminary Ethnographic Study of Producers and Consumers”
J7. Katherine Spring, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, “Film Music and Moral Rights in Hollywood’s Early Sound Era”
“Place des Arts” by Flickr user Logan Charlot, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
FRIDAY, March 27
Session K 9:00 – 10:45 a.m.
K22. Dis-locating Sound
Chair: Lutz Koepnick, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
Co-Chair: Nora M. Alter, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Nora M. Alter, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY, “Shocking Sounds: Surrealism, Songs, and the Essay Film”
Jennie Hirsh, MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART, “Transmissions of Fascism: Advertising Architecture through the Ente Radio Rurale Poster Campaign”
Kenneth White, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, “Reason and Passion: Joyce Wieland, Pierre Vallières, and Cold War North American Avant-garde Cinema”
Lutz Koepnick, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, “Sounds without Frontiers, Cinemas without Screens”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session M 2:15 – 4:00 p.m.
M2. She Bop on Screen Girls, Popular Music, and Visual Media
Chair: Diane Pecknold, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
Mary Kearney, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME, “Getting Girls to Rock: Gendering Rock ‘n’ Roll in US Teen Media, 1956–1966”
Norma Coates, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “Dangerous Representations: Empowered Teen Girls, the Monkees, and ‘The’ Monkees”
Morgan Blue, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, “Disney Channel’s Pop Girlhood”
Diane Pecknold, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE, “Spectral Cityscapes and the Tween Pop Public Sphere”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
M8. Workshop: The Problem of the Radio Canon
Chair: Jason Loviglio, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Workshop Participants:
Debra Rae Cohen, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Bill Kirkpatrick, DENISON UNIVERSITY
Kate Lacey, UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
Jason Loviglio, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Elena Razlogova, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Special Event 9:00 – 9:30 p.m.
Satosphere: 360-Degree Spherical Screen with 157 Speakers
Location: Société des Arts et Technologies, 1201 Boulevard Saint Laurent, 3rd Floor
Channeling the techno-utopianism of Expo 67, the Satosphere Dome is a state-sponsored, permanent environment dedicated to large-scale moving image and sound experimentation. With a screen that is eighteen meters in diameter (that’s 60 feet!), you can sit back—or literally lie down—on the couches and ponder a distinct mode of spectatorship, immersion, and art. An experience of audio-visual envelopment not to be missed!
Metro: St Laurent
Directions: From conference hotel—a 15 minute walk from the hotel. Walk east on René-Lévesque and turn left (north) onto Boulevard Saint Laurent.
Sponsor: Concordia University
Friday Individual Papers of Interest
K13. Alan Pike, EMORY UNIVERSITY, “The Genrefication of Prison Films in the Early Sound Era”
K14. Thomas Dorey, YORK UNIVERSITY, “Pop-up Paratext: Film Directors, Music Videos, and Paramediality”
L9. Eileen Rositzka, UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS, “Corpographic Coordinates: Zero Dark Thirty, United 93, and the Sound of Vision”
L12. Lilya Kaganovsky, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, “Socialist Realist Sound”
M6. Vanessa Chang, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, “From Playback to Play: Gestural Invention and Digital Music”
M7. Michael B. Gillespie, OHIO UNIVERSITY, “‘Ne me quitte pas’: 9/11, Civic Pop, and Sonic Historiography”
“18/07/12” by Flickr user Thien, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
SATURDAY, March 28
Session N 9:00 – 10:45 a.m.
Meeting
Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Room: Les Voyageurs 2, Lobby Level
N8. The Voice in Translation
Chair: Jennifer Fleeger, URSINUS COLLEGE
Sarah Wright, ROYAL HOLLOWAY-UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, “Locating the Voice in Silent Cinema: Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves”
Jennifer Fleeger, URSINUS COLLEGE, “Tito Schipa, Italian Film Sound, and Opera’s Legacy on Screen”
Tom Whittaker, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, “‘Being’ Woody Allen: Dubbing, Vocal Performance, and Stardom in Spanish Film”
Christine Ehrick, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE, “Voice, Gender, and the Soundscapes of Buenos Aires in the Comedy of Niní Marshall, 1937–1947”
Session O 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
O6. The Public Good Goes to Market: North American Public Service Media and the Marketplace in the Digital Convergence Era
Chair: Christopher Cwynar, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Jason Loviglio, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, “NPR Listens: Psychographics, Audience Measurement, and the Privatization of Public Service Radio”
Kyle Conway, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA, “Policy beyond the Nation-State; or, Why the French Didn’t Watch Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie”
Christopher Cwynar, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “Social Service Media?: Assessing the CBC and NPR’s Engagement with Social Media Platforms”
Respondent: Laurie Ouellette, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
O11. The Sonic Impact of Scale Local and National Radio in “the 1960s”
Chair: Darrell Newton, SALISBURY UNIVERSITY
Josh Glick, YALE UNIVERSITY, “Soundscapes of South Los Angeles: Radio and the Voices of Resistance”
Darrell Newton, SALISBURY UNIVERSITY, “Being of Color in Britain: Identity, 1960s Radio, and West Indian Immigration”
Eleanor Patterson, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “We Are Not Reviving a Ghost: Reconfiguring Radio Drama in Post-network Era United States”
Alexander Russo, THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, “Musical Storytelling to a Fragmented Nation: American Top 40 and Cultural Conflict”
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session P 1:00 – 2:45 p.m.
P7. Fringe Time: Gender and Crossover Programming in the US Radio-TV Transition
Chair: Jennifer Wang, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR
Elana Levine, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE, “Picturing Soap Opera: Daytime Serials and the Transition from Radio to Television”
Jennifer Wang, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR, “Resuscitating the Wife Saver: Gender, Genre, and Commercialism in Postwar Broadcasting”
Jennifer Lynn Jones, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “Signal Size: Gender, Ethnicity, and Diet Episodes in the Radio-TV Transition”
Kate Newbold, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “‘Now the Booing Is Done in Soprano’: Wrestling, Female Audiences, and Discourses of Liveness in the Radio-to-TV Transition in America, 1940–1953”
Sponsor: Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
P10. Historicizing Music and Transmedia
Chair: Landon Palmer, INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Kyle Barnett, BELLARMINE UNIVERSITY, “Popular Music Celebrity, Jazz-age Media Convergence, and Depression-era Transmedia”
Kevin John Bozelka, AUSTIN COLLEGE, “Everything on the Pig but the Squeal: Artist/ Publishers and Recordings in the Post-WWII American Entertainment Industry”
Landon Palmer, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “All Together Now: The Beatles, United Artists, and Transmedia Conglomeration”
Alyxandra Vesey, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “Mixing in Feminism: Playlists, Networks, and Counterpublics”
Sponsors: Radio Studies and Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Groups
P12. Workshop: Trans Women’s Media Activism Digital Interventions and HIV/AIDS
Chair: Marty Fink, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Workshop Participants:
Morgan Page, MCGILL UNIVERSITY
Morgan Sea, TRANZISTER RADIO
Bryn Kelly, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR
Alexandra Juhasz, PITZER COLLEGE
Sponsor: Media Literacy & Pedagogical Outreach Scholarly Interest Group
Session Q 3:00 – 4:45 p.m.
Q18. Workshop: Something Good? The Sound of Music at Fifty
Chair: Desirée Garcia, Arizona State University
Workshop Participants:
Steven Cohan, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
Caryl Flinn, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Sean Griffin, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY
Adrienne L. McLean, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS
Desirée Garcia, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
Q22. New Approaches to Music and Film Theory and History
Chair: Lea Jacobs, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
James Buhler, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, “Toward a Theory of the Part-talkie”
Lea Jacobs, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “Rethinking the Sync: Adorno, Eisler, and Eisenstein”
Jeff Smith, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “Paying the Piper at Paramount: Budgets, Shooting Schedules, and the Score for Midnight (1939)”
Andrew Johnston, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Chromatic Rhythms and Display Memories”
Q23. Stream Engines: Streaming Services and Media Distribution
Chair: Devon Powers, DREXEL UNIVERSITY
Jeremy Morris and Devon Powers, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON AND DREXEL UNIVERSITY, “Now Streaming: Control, Content, and Curation in Digital Music Services”
Blake Hallinan, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “‘My Context Is My Query’: Algorithmic Flow as Emergent Entertainment Paradigm”
Eric Harvey, WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY, “Listening Like a Platform: The Reorganization and Intensification of Streaming Music Commerce”
Chris Baumann, STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY, “It’s Not TV, It’s Netflix: On Streaming Netflix, Technological Obsolescence, and the Cultural Status of a Medium”
Session R 5:00 – 6:45 p.m.
R11. The Acoustic 1930s: Global Film Sound Technique and Aesthetic from Silent to Sound
Chair: Ling Zhang, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Kathryn Kalinak, RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE, “New Means of Enormous Power: Soviet Film Music in the 1930s”
Charles O’Brien, CARLETON UNIVERSITY, “Film Sound and Dubbing Technique”
Jeremy Barham, UNIVERSITY OF SURREY, “When Is a Musical Film Not a Film Musical?: Diegetic and Generic Complexity in Germany’s First Sound Films”
Ling Zhang, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “The Comic Soundscape and Audiovisual Heterogeneity: Yuan Muzhi’s Scenes of City Life (1935) and Street Angel (1937)”
Respondent: James Lastra, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
R12. Sounding the Interactive Documentary: Non-fiction, New Media, and the Problem of Immersion
Chair: Michael Baker, SHERIDAN COLLEGE
Co-Chair: Randolph Jordan, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
Michael Baker, SHERIDAN COLLEGE, “Bear 71, Popular Music, and the Problem of Immersion”
Randolph Jordan, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, “The Soundscapes of Mobile Periodization in Stan Douglas’s iOS app, Circa 1948”
Milena Droumeva, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, “Curating Everyday Life: Smartphones and Interactive Documentary as Daily Practice”
Respondent: Andrew Utterson, ITHACA COLLEGE
Sponsor: Documentary Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Special Event 8:00 – 9:30 p.m.
Experiments in 3D: Norman McLaren
Location: Henry F. Hall Building, Concordia University, 1455 boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Room H-110
Please refer to Montreal vicinity map on page 32 for location. Join us for a screening of four recently restored stereoscopic and stereophonic shorts by renowned Scottish-Canadian animator and experimental filmmaker Norman McLaren. The evening will also feature a new documentary about McLaren’s musical compositions entitled Norman McLaren: Animated Musician, with its director Donald McWilliams in attendance. A brief question period will follow the screening with the National Film Board filmmakers, researchers, and McLaren collaborators who formed the restoration team.
Films to be screened in 3D:
Around Is Around, directed by Norman McLaren, 1951 (3D animation)
Now Is the Time, directed by Norman McLaren, 1951 (3D animation)
O Canada, directed by Evelyn Lambart, 1952 (3D animation)
Twirligig, directed by Gretta Ekman, 1952 (3D animation)
Norman McLaren: Animated Musician, directed by Donald McWilliams, 2014 (documentary live action)
Metro: Guy-Concordia
Directions: From the conference hotel—15 minute walk from the hotel. Walk west on René-Lévesque and then turn right on MacKay St. until you come to boulevard de Maisonneuve. The Hall Building will be on the north and west side of de Maisonneuve and MacKay.
Sponsors: Concordia University, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, and the National Film Board
Saturday Individual Papers of Interest
N7. Yeidy Rivero, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, “The Original Miami Sound Machine: The Emergence of Miami as a Production Center for the US and Latin America”
Christopher Westgate, JOHNSON & WALES UNIVERSITY, “Passion Points for Latin@ Pop Music: Heat, Hits, and the Emotion of Economics”
P17. Ioana Uricaru, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, “No Melo—Music and Minimalism in Recent Romanian Cinema”
Q4. Andrew Ritchey, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, “Trompe l’oreille: Dislocations of Sound and Sense in a Partly Québécoise Family of Recorded Sound Works by Michael Snow”
R7. Kathy Fuller-Seeley, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, “Becoming Benny: Jack Benny’s Production of a Radio Comedy Persona, 1932–1936”
Lauren Sklaroff, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, “The Hilarious Sophie Tucker: Humor, Womanhood, and the Dynamics of Delivery”
R20. Victoria Simon, MCGILL UNIVERSITY, “Anybody Can Be a Musician: Transparency and the Discursive Construction of Touch in Interfaces for Music Composition”
“Montreal skyline from McGill University” by Flickr user slack12, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
SUNDAY, March 29
Session S 9:00 – 10:45 a.m.
S16. Speaking of Sound: Historical Studies in Sound Practices and Technologies
Chair: Matthew Perkins, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES
Meredith Ward, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “The Sound Industry Lays the Golden Egg: Noise, Electroacoustical Research, and the Adjustment to Film Sound”
Casey Long, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON, “First Thing I Learned . . . Is When to Say Ain’t: Dialect in 1930s Hollywood”
Jennifer Psujek, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS, “‘Free to Do Anything’: Fight Club (1999), Indiewood, and the Composite Score at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century”
Matthew Perkins, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES, “Sound Work: The Acquisition of Sound Labor and Division Thereof at Vitaphone and Warner Bros., 1925–1931”
Sponsor: Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Session T 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
T11. Sound, Technology, and Auditory Knowledge
Chair: Alejandra Bronfman, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Workshop Participants:
Axel Volmar, MCGILL UNIVERSITY
Carolyn Birdsall, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
Anthony Enns, DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY
Alejandra Bronfman, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Session U 1:00 – 2:45 p.m.
U3. Workshop: What Can Disability Studies Do for Media Studies?
Chair: Bill Kirkpatrick, DENISON UNIVERSITY
Workshop Participants:
Elizabeth Ellcessor, INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Mara Mills, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Tasha Oren, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE
Jonathan Sterne, MCGILL UNIVERSITY
U12. Music Structures and Affect
Chair: Britta Hanson, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Katherine Reed, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, “Between Grace and Nature: The Tree of Life’s Musical Dialogic Process and Formal Structure”
Phoebe Macrossan, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, “Constructing Glee’s Sung-through Musical Narrative through Spontaneity and Verisimilitude”
Christopher Culp, SUNY-UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, “‘This Isn’t Real, but I Just Wanna Feel’: Musicals, Television, and the Queer Ineffable Passage of Time”
Britta Hanson, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, “Music as Rhetoric in Contemporary Documentaries”
U18. Discontinuous Colonial Modernities of Media Film and Radio in British Malaya and Portuguese Southern Africa
Chair: Peter Bloom, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA
Co-Chair: Nadine Chan, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Ines Cordeiro Dias, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES, “Discourses of Urban Modernity in Portuguese Colonial Cinema”
Nadine Chan, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, “Cinematic Afterlives: Films of the Malayan Emergency at the Transition from Empire to Independence”
Peter Bloom, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA, “Learning the Speech of Counterinsurgency as National Allegory: BBC Radio and Instructional Propaganda Film during the Malayan Emergency”
Respondent: Peter Limbrick, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA CRUZ
Sponsor: Middle East Caucus and Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
Sunday Individual Papers of Interest
T7. Keir Keightley, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “Tin Pan Alley Goes Silent: Two Films about the Music Industry in 1919”
T13. Roger Almendarez, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Radio Arte—The Formation of a Mediated, Local Latina/o Identity in Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood”
“Youppi ! (31 / 365)” by Flickr user Jacques Fournier, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Sound at SCMS 2014
With a wide array of departmental affiliations and disciplinary backgrounds represented among its society membership, as well as an active and creative leadership, the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies is an excellent place to get a sense of where sound studies is and might be heading in the academy. To help read those tea leaves at this year’s upcoming conference in Seattle, we are thrilled to welcome one of the key figures working at the intersection of sound and media today, Denison University Communications Professor Bill Kirkpatrick.
Bill is not only a first-rate scholar — he’s at the forefront of emerging work on sound media and disability — but he’s also a producer, one of the people behind Cinema Journal‘s podcast Aca-Media, which is helping to show how sound can be not only a media studies topic, but a way of doing media studies. As one of the co-chairs of the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group at SCMS, Bill has also taken a leadership role in promoting the work of many other scholars, and we’re excited to hear from him on the state of the field. Here are his thoughts and a curated guide for how to make the most of the conference in the Emerald City this year.
– SCMS/ASA Editor Neil Verma
—
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies is clearly in a boom period for sound studies. In interviews for the March episode of Aca-Media, SCMS programmers Angelo Restivo and Bruce Brasell each noted the extraordinary rise in papers on sound as one of the key trends in the field, and the 2014 schedule bears this out with nearly 150 papers related to sound, music, and radio—an average of thirty each day of the conference, which will take place in Seattle from March 19-23.
Last year, in his 2013 SCMS preview for SO!, Neil Verma sounded a little nervous that this rise in sound-related papers was somehow too good to be true: “This year may mark the point at which sound studies became – likely temporarily, and perhaps distressingly – normal.” It might be temporary, but the quantity and variety of papers on sound again this year is definitely not distressing. Even more than last year, this year’s conference goes well beyond radio, music, and soundtracks to offer papers on sound in airplanes, in museums, in video games, and on phones, as well as governmental policies connected to sound and more.
Here are some trends and highlights I noticed while going through the schedule:
- In my first read-through, I was alarmed by what appeared to be a decline in the number of radio-themed papers and panels. We know that SCMS is still establishing itself as a good place for radio studies, which the still-nascent Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group is beginning to help, but it would have been nice to see a few more panels in this area. After my second reading of the schedule, however, it’s fairer to say that radio is holding steady, especially if we count podcasting. I hope to catch a lot of these papers, and you can’t go wrong with any of the Radio Studies SIG-sponsored panels (marked by * below). In the “something different” category, I’m particularly interested in Matt Sienkiewicz’s paper on “Radio Islam” in Afghanistan and Lana Lin’s “Psychoanalytic Reading of Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio,” which will look at the intersections between radio and telepathy in the early social imaginary.
- Last year Neil urged sound studies to “keep it weird,” and there are definitely some papers this year that fit that bill. One of my favorites is Stephen Groening’s study of how the airplane environment affects issues of immersion and distraction, which is one of those topics I wish I’d thought of first. I also hope to catch a paper by Dimitrios Pavlounis on how silent films before 1920 used the detective dictograph as a plot device, constructing the idea of sound recording in a silent medium. Sarah Street’s “Synthetic Dreams: Color-Film-Music in the 1920s” will examine some notable sound-image experiments (including Eisenstein’s) during the 1920s. And though I don’t know anything about it but the title, Todd Decker’s presentation on “Helicopter Music” has got to be good, right?
- For a town with as storied a musical history as Seattle, the music offerings this year do little to take advantage of place (something that Neil also noted regarding last year’s conference in the even more storied city of Chicago). Nonetheless there are all kinds of cool papers on music and musicals. Given the Beatles nostalgia this year, William Gombash’s paper on the promotional films for “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” seems apropos; pair it with Jessica Fowler on “The Monkees and the Birth of New Hollywood” and a talk on Elvis Presley’s musicals by Amanda McQueen for a DIY ’60s pop-musical mini-conference. Or you could go the other direction with a panel on Wagner (H13) and several intriguing papers on opera (look for the papers by Sabine Hake, Ling Zhang, and Jennifer Fleeger).
- This is a good year for technologies of sound, from the cinematic apparatus to the architecture of listening spaces. See, for example, Meredith Ward’s paper on “Architecting Listening in the Cinema House” or Rafael Freire on “The Conversion to Sound in Brazil,” to give just two interesting examples.
- The Scholarly Interest Groups for Sound Studies and Radio Studies will each be holding business meetings with special programming. The Sound Studies SIG will meet over lunch on Friday (3/21, 12:15-2:00 in Ballard). The Radio Studies SIG will meet the next morning (3/22, 9:00-10:45 in Ballard) and will feature a talk by folks from Seattle indie rock station KEXP about radio in a streaming age.
“Tower Records Seattle Music Mural” by Flickr user Zoomar, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
To help you navigate these and the other offerings, I’ve provided not one but two conference guides. The first is arranged chronologically for all the sound-related panels. The second is arranged topically in four categories (Sound & Soundtracks, Music & Musicals, Radio and Podcasting, and Other: Museums, Airplanes, Phones, Video Games, and Policy). I’ve also added content notes on just a few papers where I’ve been in contact with the author and learned a bit more about the talk. I apologize in advance for the inevitable errors and omissions! [please report any flubs to SO! ASA/SCMS Special Editor Neil Verma, nkhv@soundingoutblog.com, we’ll make corrections as needed]
—
In closing, what should we look for—or at least hope for—from SCMS in 2015? I’ll list my three biggies:
Music: The quantity of papers this year on opera and classical music in film and media, while still small, suggests that SCMS might finally be emerging as a conference for music scholars beyond pop music, and I hope this trend will continue. I can’t get into the methodological and theoretical rifts within the discipline of musicology here, but for years Norma Coates, Tim Anderson, and many others have been working to make SCMS a viable alternative to the dominant musicology conferences that, in large and small ways, are hostile to (or simply wrong for) critical-cultural music scholars, especially if their topic has a TV/film component. So let the word go out that they are welcome here! As a side note, can someone please take better advantage of the amazing history of music in Montreal next year?
Sound: Nothing to complain about here—sound is alive and well. I would like to see a few more papers on television and sound, and one could argue that the aesthetic and economic analyses of sound could be supplemented with more papers on political and social dimensions of sound. But overall sound studies seems to be in excellent shape at SCMS.
Radio: I’m not pessimistic about radio studies at SCMS, but it is also not where I had expected it to be at this point. We need to encourage more international scholars to participate, and we can hope that the Montreal venue will make it easier and more attractive for European radio scholars—of whom there are many—to apply. Thematically, there remains a troubling “donut hole” in radio scholarship that I hope more scholars will address: we have lots of work on early radio (into the 1950s), and lots of work on contemporary radio and podcasting, but that leaves a half-century gap that doesn’t receive nearly enough scholarly attention. In other words, radio studies is far from exhausted, so I hope that radio scholars and the RS SIG can make 2015 a year of growth and diversification for radio at SCMS.
* = Sponsored by the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
** = Sponsored by the Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
—
Featured Image: “KEXP, Seattle” by Flickr user Curtis Cronn, CC BY-ND-ND 2.0
—
Bill Kirkpatrick is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Communication Department at Denison University in Ohio. His research interests include broadcast history, media and disability, and media policy. He is currently working on an anthology on media and disability and a monograph on the intersections of radio and disability in the 1920s and ‘30s. He is also a co-producer of the film and media studies podcast Aca-Media (www.aca-media.org).
—
“Bumbershoot procession, 1974” by Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0
I. Chronological Index
Jump to WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2014
Jump to THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014
Jump to FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2014
Jump to SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 2014
Jump to SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 2014
II. Topic Index
Jump to SOUND & SOUNDTRACKS
Jump to MUSIC & MUSICALS
Jump to RADIO/PODCASTING
Jump to OTHER
.
I. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19
Session A 10:00 – 11:45 a.m.
A4: French Auteurs: Becker, Demy, Bresson, Bunuel
Tracy Cox-Stanton, SAVANNA COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN, “Film Sound, Footsteps, and Unvoiced Desire in Bresson’s “Pickpocket” (1959) and Bunuel’s “Belle du Jour” (1967)”
.
A10: Knowing the Score
Kevin Donnelly, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON, “Phantom Power: Electrifying an Old Silent Film”
Ariane Lebot, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “Composing the Narrative: Bernard Herrmann’s Contribution to De Palma’s ‘Obsession’ (1976)”
Megan Alvarado Saggese, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, “From Sound to Cinema: Dissonance and Disruption between Adorno’s Theory of Film and Kagel’s “Antithese””
Christine Sprengler, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “‘The Broom That Sweeps the Cobwebs Away’: Vertigo’s Soundtrack as Sound Art”
.
A16: Re-viewing Feminisms
Elizabeth Watkins, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, “Gesture and the Female Voice”
Alexander Russo, CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, “Androids as the New ‘Other’: Janelle Monae’s Feminist Afrofuturism in The Metropolis Suite” (focuses on the sonic attributes of race and gender, as well as her engagement with the sounds of masculine black music of the second half of the 20th century)
.
Session B 12:00 – 1:45 p.m.
B6: Policy: The Law and other Gatekeepers
Birk Weiberg, ZURICH UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS, “Roy J. Pomeroy, Dunning Process Co., Inc., and Paramount Publix Corporation vs. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., Vitaphone Corporation, and Frederick Jackman: How the Movie Industry Learned about Patents.”
.
B15: Promotional Culture
William Gombash, VALENCIA COLLEGE, “The Evolution of Media Convergence and Popular Music: The Promotional Films for “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”” (will include discussion of how the Beatles recorded the songs and how the evolving nature of the complexities of the production of their music mitigated against live performances)
.
B19: Avant-garde Aesthetic Strategies
Dustin Zemel, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Polyphony and Documentary Presentness” (explores the idea of Bakhtinian literary polyphony and it’s relationship/relevance to film, using Jonas Mekas’s The Brig as an example of how overlapping voices in the soundtrack can effectively facilitate the presentation of multiple, autonomous presences.)
.
Session C 2:00 – 3:45 p.m.
C6: Narrative Forms of/and American Authorship
Paul Cote, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, “Encountering Sonic Memories: Sound, Childhood, and Escapism in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.””
.
C8: The Spaces of Media Production and Consumption
Meredith Ward, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Black Boxes and Rich, Repressed Sounds: Architecting Listening in the Cinema House”
.
C10: Listening to Films: Cinematic Sound and Media Culture in East Asia
Nicole Huang, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “Listening to Films: Radio and Communal Film Culture in 1970s China”
Kerim Yasar, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME, “Otozukuri: Affect, Ontology, and Techne in Early Japanese Radio Drama and Talkie Sound Effects”
Giorgio Biancorosso, UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, “Double Agents and The Poor Man’s Orchestra: Music and the Aesthetic of the Self in *Chunking Express* (1994)”
Ling Zhang, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “The Flowing Ambiguity of Soundscape: Female Voice-over in Spring in a Small Town and Fei Mu’s Chinese Operatic Sound Aesthetic”
.
Session D 4:00 – 5:45 p.m.
D4: The Globalization of Post-Millenial Persian Media
Matt Sienkiewicz, BOSTON COLLEGE, “Uncle Sam’s Koran: American Broadcasting, Koranic Values and Hybrid “Radio Islam” in Afghanistan”
.
D6: Objects: The Medium Is the Material
Paul Jasen, CARLETON UNIVERSITY, “Infrasound: Spectres of the Manmade Unknown”
.
D10: Physician, Heal Thy Selfie
Stephanie Brown, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, “‘A Waiting Room That Doesn’t Suck’: Negotiations of Agency, Authenticity, and Community in the “Mental Illness Happy Hour Podcast””
.
D13: New Histories of Animation
Lora Mjolsness, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE, “Sound, Synchronization, and Subversion: The Early Animation of the Brumberg Sisters”
.
D15: Distribution in the Digital Age
Tim Anderson, OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY, “Why Don’t We Give it Away?: Value and “Free” for an Emerging Music Industry”
Jeremy Morris, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “‘App’etite for Digitization: App-based Albums and the Virtual Commodification of Music”
.
“Sub Pop 20th Anniversary!” by Flickr user Rakka, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
THURSDAY, MARCH 20
Session E 9:00 – 10:45 a.m.
E1: Gender and Contemporary Technologies
Jacqueline Vickery, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS, “Mobile Phones, a Girl’s Best Friend?: How the Mobile Phone Industry Legitimizes Surveillance, Commodifies Talk, and Genders Technology”
.
*E10: Sound: Aesthetics and Ideology
Justin Morris, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, “Radio Ranch: Emergent Seriality in 1930s Film and Radio”
Paula Musegades, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, “Silence is Golden: Aaron Copland’s Film Score for “The Heiress””
Yuki Takinami, UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO, “The Issue of Sound-Cinema Aesthetics in Early-1930s Japan: Theory and Practice”
Alejandra Bronfman, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, “Screeches, Static, and Silence: The Fragmented Terrain of Caribbean Radio”
.
E13: Deleuzian Aesthetics
Justin Horton, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Vibration, Resonance, Deformation: Deleuze’s Soundful Aesthetics”
.
E19: New/Media/Art/Objects
Alison Wielgus, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, “Watch Out! The World’s Behind You: Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Promises of Expanded Cinema” (discusses the influence of La Monte Young and drone music on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and how the live performance of such music creates a new context for interpreting the Warhol films screened during the events; unfortunately Alison will not be able to attend the conference, but you can contact her for more information)
.
Session F 11:00 – 12:45 p.m.
F1: Reconsidering Psychoanalysis and Media Studies: Towards a Productive Intersection
Lana Lin, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “Are These Thoughts My Own?: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Upton Sinclair’s “Mental Radio””
.
F5: Margins of the New Wave: Japanese Cinemas of the 1960s
Michael Raine, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “Music, Musicals, and the Margins of the Japanese New Wave”
.
F16: Feminist Approaches to War Media
Debra White-Stanley, KEENE STATE COLLEGE, “Combat Medicine, Gendered Trauma, and Audio-Vision” (an interdisciplinary integration of sound studies with the idea of “women at war”)
.
F17: Negotiating Race in Digital Spaces
Sarah Florini, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “Networked Enclaves: Black Podcasters’ Responses to the George Zimmerman Verdict”
.
**F18: Documentary Sound and the Global City
Rita Safariants, VASSAR COLLEGE, “The Gig is in the Boiler Room: Filming Leningrad’s Rock-n-Roll Counterculture”
Josh Glick, YALE UNIVERSITY, “The Renegade in the Network: Joe Saltzman, CBS, and Soundtrack Innovations”
Ashish Chadha, UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND, “Sound in the City: Experimental Documentaries of Films Division in India”
Noelle Griffis, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, “Telling it Like it Is: The Camera as Voice in AFI Supported Minority Youth Films of the 1960s”
.
Session G 1:00 – 2:45 p.m.
**G18: Between Speech, Music, and Noise: The Voice in Recent Film and Television
John Richardson, UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, “Between Dialogue and Sound: The Voice, Audiovisual Flow, and the Aestheticizing Impulse”
Robynn Stilwell, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, “Walking and Talking and Singing and Dancing: Axes and Boundaries in the Television Soundscape”
Claudia Gorbman, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, TACOMA, “The Master’s Voice”
Mitchell Morris, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, “Fictions of the Facture: Vocal Realities in “Velvet Goldmine”
.
Session H 3:00 – 4:45 p.m.
H3: Negotiating Identity, Belonging, and Citizenship in Transnational Latino Communities in the US
Veronica Zavala, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA, “Alivianadas: Spanish-Language Radio Incentives”
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H4: French Film Archives: New Findings, New Forms
Charlie Michael, EMORY UNIVERSITY, “The Lescure Report and the Future of French Audiovisual Policy” (an analysis of the participatory blog that the French Ministry of Culture launched to have a public discussion about audiovisual reform)
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*H9: Regionalism, Accent, and Dialect at the BBC, 1930-1955
Debra Rae Cohen, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, ““There’s No Such Thing as Reet”: Reclaiming Region in Burbleton””
Ian Whittington, UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI, “Regional Voice, National Crisis: J.B. Priestley as Second World War Radio Celebrity”
Emily Bloom, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Speaking Oirish: The BBC Third Programme and Irish Drama”
Damien Keane, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, “A Back-Window on Belfast: W.R. Rodgers’ The Return Room”
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H13: Cinema & Wagner
Amy Stebbins, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “Being Richard: History, Myth, and the Biopic”
Rebekah Rutkoff, CUNY, “Towards a Complete Order: Markopoulos and Wagner”
Ken Eisenstein, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO / BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY, “‘All Things Pass Into the Night’: Music, Montage, and Wagner in Billy Wilder’s “Love in the Afternoon” (1957)”
.
*H15: Branded Entertainment of the Past
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, ““The Dean of Radio Salesmen” vs. “The Huckster”: Jack Benny’s Struggle with Sponsor Lucky Strike, 1944-1948”
Cynthia Meyers, COLLEGE OF MOUNT SAINT VINCENT, “The Problems of Branded Entertainment: BBDO, Sponsors, and Blacklists on Radio and Early Television”
Lauren Bratslavsky, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, “Soft Hands and Soft Westerns: The True Stories of Death Valley Days, 1930-72”
Andrew deWaard, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, “Marty Weiser, Exploitation Agent: Product Placement, Publicity, and the Tie-Up Business in Hollywood, 1940-1980”
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H19: Intermedial Modernisms: Cinema’s Expanded Horizons in the 1920s
Sarah Street, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, “Synthetic Dreams: Color-Film-Music in the 1920s”
.
H25: Once More with Feeling: Audiences, Origins, and Affect in the Hollywood Musical
Desiree Garcia, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage: The Origins of the Hollywood Show Musical”
Sean Griffin, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY, “Don’t Fence Me In: B Studio Musicals’ Appeal to Marginalized Audiences”
Caryl Flinn, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, “The Kitschy Feelings of Kitschy Musicals”
Kelly Kessler, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, “I Dreamed a Dream of Close-Ups Gone By: “Les Misérables” and the Visual Excess of Stage-to-Screen Transfers in the FX Era”
.
Session I 5:00 – 6:45 p.m.
I4: Museum as Medium: Technology, Spectatorship, Space
Karine Bouchard, UNIVERSITY DE MONTREAL, “(Im)mobilized Sound: Towards Listening Experiences in the Museum Exhibition.”
.
**I10: Sounds of Labor: Musicians’ Employment in Hollywood’s Transition to Sound
Jennifer Fleeger, URSINUS COLLEGE, “Putting Opera to Work: Song, Stardom, and Labor in the Vitaphone Opera Shorts”
Rob King, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, ““I Want Music Everywhere”: Underscoring in the Hal Roach Studios’ Early Sound Films”
Daniel Goldmark, CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, “The Musical Roots of “The Jazz Singer””
.
I11: Rethinking Wong Kar-wei: New Approaches to an Established International Auteur
Angelo Restivo, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Wong Kar-wai: Sound + Image”
.
I19: Makes Me Feel Some Kinda Way: Television and Black Women’s Affect
Racquel Gates, COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND, CUNY, “The Ratchet Public Sphere: Love and Hip Hop Atlanta and Black Women’s Culture”
.
“Musicians and dancers at Pike Place Market, circa 1972” by Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0
FRIDAY, MARCH 21
Session J 9:00 -10:45 a.m.
J1: What Is “The Symbolist Temptation?” The Aesthetics of Symbolism in Transnational Cinema
Tami Williams, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE, “A Music of Silence: Abstraction and Sensation in Belle Époque Symbolist Theater and 1920s French Art Cinema”
.
J3: Brazilian Cinema Revisited: Technologies, Exhibition, Reception
Rafael Freire, UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL FLUMINENSE, “The Conversion to Sound in Brazil”
..
*J10: Radio and Other Sounds
Hannah Spaulding, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Eavesdropping as Entertainment: The Enormous Radio and Shut Up Little Man!”
Jack Curtis Dubowsky, ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY, “The Music of Brokeback Mountain”
Ming-Yuen Ma, PITZER COLLEGE, “Noises of Protest: Sound, Race, and Violence in Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag and Paul D. Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation”
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J19: Race, Gender, and the Body in Found Footage Film
Jaimie Baron, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, “Unintentional Singers and Racial Ventriloquism in Contemporary Found Footage Videos” (Explores how found footage (remix) videomakers are literally making their (speaking) subjects sing and how this constitutes a form of ventriloquism)
.
Session K 12:15-2:00 p.m.
*Meeting of the Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group
.
K9: Medium and Method in “Early Television” History
Kate Newbold, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Television Ontology and Media Methodology: Exploring Televisual Fragmentation in Phonograph, Broadcast, and Print Industries, 1926-1940”
Luke Stadel, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Radio/Television/Sound, 1922-1941”
.
K18: Revisiting Kurosawa
Michael Bourdaghs, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “Hearing the Cold War: Kurosawa Akira’s Soundtracks and Soviet Film Theory”
.
Session L 2:15-4:00 p.m.
**L10: Sound Waves: Technology and Practice in Film Sound
Charles O’Brien, CARLETON UNIVERSITY, “Multi-Track Sound and the Battle of Paris: American and German Films for French Distribution”
Eric Dienstfrey, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “Splits, Quad, and the Psychedelic: Dolby’s Rear Channels Examined”
Katherine Quanz, WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, “The Industrial Impact of Toronto’s Transition to Digidesign Technology in the Mid-2000s”
Benjamin Wright, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, “Atmos Now: How Dolby is Transforming the Art and Craft of Sound Mixing”
.
“Sound Garden” by Flickr user The Kozy Shack, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
SATURDAY, MARCH 22
Session M 9:00-10:45 a.m.
*Meeting of the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group (featuring guests from KEXP to talk about radio in a streaming age)
.
M4: What is Socialist Realism? Reexamining Soviet Post-montage Cinema
Vincent Bohlinger, RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE, “Soundtrack Design in Soviet Early Sound Film”
.
M7: Playing with Avatars
Lyn Goeringer, OBERLIN CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC, “No Avatar Required: Audio-reactive Games and Physical Connectivity”
.
**M10: Global Approaches to Film Sound
Pavitra Sundar, KETTERING UNIVERSITY, “Thinking Sound, Rethinking History in Hindi Cinema”
James Lastra, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “From Mickey Mouse to Peter Kubelka”
Esra-Gokce Sahin, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, “Soundscape and Humor in Acharaka Comedy in Prewar Japan”
.
M16: Hispanic Musicals: Nationalisms and Transnational Stars
Valeria Camporesi, AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MADRID,, “Latin Stars, Spanish Women: Lola Flores in the 1950s”
Ana Lopez, TULANE UNIVERSITY, “La Vecindad: A Musical Space for the Mexican Cinema”
Dolores Tierney, SUSSEX UNIVERSITY, and Sergio de la Mora, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS, “Re-mapping Mexican Cinema of the 1970s: Music and Female Sexuality in Zona Roja”
Enrique Garcia, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE, “From Brechtian to Hollywood Approach: The Hispanic Community and Salsa Music in the Documentary Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) and the Biopic/Musical El Cantante”
.
M17: Forms of Non-Fiction: Voices, Realisms, Disciplines, Shadows
James V. Catano, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Voiceover and the Essay Film”
.
Session N 11:00-12:45 p.m.
N2: The Precarious Aesthetic in Contemporary Moving Images
Arild Fetveit, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, “Death, Love, and Cinematic Nostalgia: The Precarious Aesthetic of Lana Del Ray” (linking the aesthetics of her videos to her music, in particular to the ways in which she uses her voice)
.
*N6: Locating Radio: The Symbolic, Cultural, and Political Dimensions of ‘Place’ in North American Radio Broadcasting
Brian Fauteux, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “Localities and Independent Music in Satellite Radio Programming”
Catherine Martin, BOSTON UNIVERSITY, “‘I’ve Got My Eyes Open and I Can’t be Crooked’: Female Virtue and National Identity in “Terry and the Pirates””
Eleanor Patterson, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “This American Franchise: Negotiating the Production of Local Public Radio for a Global Audience”
Jennifer Wang, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR, “Some ‘Homemakers’ are More Than Housekeepers: Negotiating Modern Living, Gendered Spheres, and the Rural Lifestyle in Wisconsin Radio”
.
N11: The Little Flashlight of the Usher: Objects in Exhibition Between Spectator and Screen
Stephen Groening, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY, “‘If You Don’t Want to Look at It, No One Can Force You’: Spectatorship, Agency, and Headphones”
.
**N16: Teaching Post-Production Sound From a Sound Studies Perspective
Mark Berger, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Jay Beck, CARLETON COLLEGE
George Larkin, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
.
Session O 1:00-2:45 p.m.
O4: Expanding the Meanings of Film: Cinema and the Nation in East Germany
Sabine Hake, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN, “The Popularity of High Culture: On the DEFA Opera Film”
.
O8: Sinophone Cinemas
Alison Groppe, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, “Multilingualism in Singaporean Film Dialogue: Authenticity or Argument?”
O14: Breath and the Body of the Voice in Cinema
Ian Garwood, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, “Lost in Non-Translation: Analysing Film Voices from a Position of Linguistic Incompetence”
Liz Greene, QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST, “The Gasping Breath: Controlling the Female Voice in Hollywood Cinema”
Nessa Johnston, GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART, “The Embodied Aural Encounters of Drama-Documentary”
Philippa Lovatt, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING, “Breathing Bodies: Sound and Subjectivity in the War Film”
.
Session P 3:00-4:45 p.m.
P7: “Women Contained”: Figuring Feminism in the Films of Todd Haynes
Respondent: Maria San Filippo, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON
Matthew Von Vogt, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON, “Structural Anorexia in “Superstar””
Jess Issacharoff, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, ““Poison’s” Oath in Another Language: Todd Haynes’ Feminist Promise”
Michael Hetra, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, “Music and the Vicissitudes of Desire in Todd Haynes’s “Mildred Pierce””
.
P18: Beyond Bond: Alternative Perspectives on the James Bond Franchise
Meenasarani Murugan, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “‘Unlike Men, the Diamonds Linger’: Bassey and Bond beyond the Theme Song”
.
*P22: Musics and Medias
Shawn VanCour, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “In Search of Spectacular Sound: Aesthetic Innovation in Classical Music Programming on Early U.S. Television”
Lindsay Affleck, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, “The Young Man with a Horn: Harry James and the Intersection of the Big Band Era and Classical Hollywood”
Christopher Cwynar, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “Unbuttoning National Public Radio: Assessing the Place of Popular Music in NPR’s Current Affairs Programming”
Norma Coates, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, “5% of It is Good:” Leonard Bernstein, CBS Reports, and the Cultural Accreditation of Rock Music”
.
Session Q 5:00-6:45 p.m.
Q4: Staging Spain: Performance and Acting in Spanish Cinema
Tom Whittaker, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, ““Sounding Authentic: Direct Sound and Spanish Vocal Performance in the 1970s””
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Q5: Indian Cinema in the 1930s: Scripts, Parsi Theater, and Melodrama in the Early Sound Film
Anupama Kapse, CUNY, QUEENS COLLEGE, “At Home in One’s Voice: Melodrama and Aural Performance in the Early Sound Film”
.
Q8: New Media History
Andrew Bottomley, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “What is Internet Radio? A Historical Genealogy of the Discourses of Radio in the Digital Era”
.
Q15: Roadshows to Revisionism: Mapping Shifts in Distribution and Exhibition from the 1950s to the Present
Dennis Bingham, INDIANA UNIVERSITY – PURDUE UNIVERSITY INDIANAPOLIS, “‘Hey, Big Spender’: How Bob Fosse Ran Afoul of Roadshows and Discovered the Revisionist Musical”
.
Q18: Sound, Vision, and Experience in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s “Leviathan (2012)”
Respondent: Catherine Russell, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Christopher Pavsek, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY, “Where’s the Sense in Sensory Ethnography?”
Ohad Landesman, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY, “Faraway, So Close: “Leviathan” and the Digital Future of Observational Ethnography”
Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, “‘His Eyes Are Like the Rays of Dawn’: Color Vision and Embodiment in “Leviathan””
.
Q22: Cinematic Spaces in the Urban Global South
Paulina Suarez-Hesketh, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “Dancing Pictures, Mobile Publics (Mexico City, 1930s -1950s)”
.
“KEXP Concerts at the Mural” by Flickr user Chelsea Nesvig, CC BY 2.0
SUNDAY, MARCH 23
Session R 9:00-10:45 a.m.
R2: War/Film
Todd Decker, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ST. LOUIS, “Helicopter Music”
.
R7: Labor Practice and Labors Lost
Josh Heuman, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY, “All of This Sometimes Tends to Look Like a Closed-Shop Operation: Organizing and Professionalizing Labor Markets and Relations in Early Broadcast Writing”
Michael Slowik, SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY, “Losing the Human Element: The Shift from Live to Recorded Music in Hollywood’s Early Sound Era”
.
**R10: Sound Effects and Sound Affects
Karly-Lynne Scott, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “‘The Voice of Shouts and Moans’: Haptic Aurality, Resonance, and Affect in Pornography”
Ian Kennedy, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY, “Damion Romero’s I Know! I Know! and the Sonic Translation of Nonhuman Affect”
Dong Liang, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, “Is There a Sound Effect in this Score?: SFX in Transition”
Kelly Kirshtner, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE, “Bodies of Proof: Sound and the Aesthetics of Discovery in Televisual Space”
.
R20: Beyond Sight and Sound: Film and the Multisensory Experience
Respondent: Carl Plantinga, CALVIN COLLEGE
Joseph Kickasola, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, “The Senses Know: Wong Kar‐Wai’s Multisensory Aesthetic”
William Brown, ROEHAMPTON UNIVERSITY, “A Touch of Nostalgia, or Time and Cinematic Synaesthesia”
Luis Antunes, UNIVERSITY OF KENT & NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, “Multimodal Segmentation in Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”: Insight into the Time Window of Multisensory Integration”
.
R24: About Time
Jeff Heinzl, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, “MTV Meets Slow Cinema: Feedback Loops and the Long Take in G.O.O.D. Music’s Mercy (2012)”
.
Session S 11:00-12:45 p.m.
S3: Nontheatrical Film Communities
Pamela Krayenbuhl, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, “Raising the Barre in Screendance Scholarship: An Archival Analysis of the Dance Company Film”
.
S8: New Hollywood and the Archive
Jessica Fowler, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, “We’re the Young Generation and We’ve Got Something to Say: The Monkees and the Birth of New Hollywood”
.
S9: A Global Pre-History of Reality TV
Aniko Imre, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, “Socialist Idols: Reality Music Competition Programs in the Soviet Bloc”
.
**S10: Audible Cinema: Explorations in Sound
Kartik Nair, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, “‘The Body in the Voice’: Labor, Sound, and the Cinematic Scream”
Chunfeng Lin, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAGNE, “The Sound Identity of the Early Chinese Sound Films: Symbolism as Skin, Realism as Body, and Politics as Soul”
James Osborne, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, “Weaving a Sonic Dream: Voice, Sound, Music, and Meaning in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia””
Neil Lerner, DAVIDSON COLLEGE, “Investigating the Origins of Video Game Music Style, 1977-1983: The Early Cinema Hypothesis”
.
S11: Historicising Stars
Kyle Barnett, BELLARMINE UNIVERSITY, “Stars on the Stereo: Variations on Phonographic Celebrity”
Amanda McQueen, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, “”All They’re Good for Is to Make Money”: The Industrial Significance of Elvis Presley Musicals in 1960s Hollywood”
.
S14: Agency in Media Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Empowerment
This is a workshop in which Elisabeth Soep of Youth Radio will be participating
.
S15: Playing with the Interface
Lauren Cramer, GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY, “Race at the Interface: Rendering Blackness on WorldStarHipHop.com”
Kiri Miller, BROWN UNIVERSITY, “Gaming Gender in “Dance Central””
.
S16: Questions of Realism
Antonio Iannotta, UNIVERSITY OF SALERNO, “A Sound Laboratory for the Modern: Sound in Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the 60s”
.
Session T 1:00-2:45 p.m.
T5: Translation-Adaptation-Nation
Gerald Sim, FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY, “Cacophonies of Affection: Postcolonial Soundscapes”
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T7: Histories of Technologies
Dimitrios Pavlounis, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, “Audio Surveillance Goes to the Movies : William J. Burns, the Detective Dictograph, and the Idea of Sound Recording, 1910-1920”
.
T17: Revisoning Black Time and Space through the Afrofuturist Moving Image
Kevin Ball, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY, “The Incendiary Intergalactic: Sun Ra in Space Is the Place”
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“Bumbershoot ad, 1974” by Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0
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