Sound at ASA 2010
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:
- The Aural Border Patrol?: Migracorridos, Movidas, and Migrant Subjectivity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Israel Pastrana, University of California, San Diego (CA), Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 8:00am – 9:45am Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B, In Session “Negotiating Nationalisms in Popular Culture”
- Embodying Collapse, Performing Change: Of Tango and Jazz as “Effects”, Marcela Fuentes, University of California, Los Angeles (CA), Scheduled Time: Sat, Nov 20 – 10:00am – 11:45am, Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 213B, part of panel, “In the Event of Emergence: Revolutionary Politics and the Hemispheric Crisis State”
- Jews, Catholics, and the Color Line in Jazz Age Houston, Tyina Steptoe, University of Washington, Seattle (WA), Scheduled Time: Sun, Nov 21 – 8:00am – 9:45am Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 207B, In Session “Internationalism in the Americas”
- The Sound of Authority: Aural Observation and Hallucinatory Culture at the Government Hospital for the Insane, 1895-1905: Kathleen Brian (George Washington University (DC)), Scheduled Time: Fri, Nov 19 – 2:00pm – 3:45pm Building/Room: San Antonio Convention Center / Room 214D in session, “ASA Students’ Committee. Spotlight on Student ASA Regional Award Winners”
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!
What Mixtapes Can Teach Us About Noise: Reading Shannon and Weaver in 2010
One of the most consistently fascinating aspects of sound culture studies is an exploration of the redemptive characteristics of noise. Instead of assuming a dismissive attitude toward the role of noise in society (See our exposé on John Leicester and vuvuzelas), or an uncritical but positive stance (Marianetti, 1909, “The Futurist Manifesto“), sound culture scholars work to provide a reflexive perspective which contextualizes the various nuances of noise in all aspects of society. In a recent seminar, focusing around communication, media, and information science, I was provided with an excerpt from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s 1949 book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. This was a dry but exciting read; it was a very influential text. Not only did academics specializing in communication theory explore it because of how well it helped to define transmission model communication, but Bell Labs funded Claude Shannon and used his research to help establish the global information networks on which we rely today. Telephone wires, cellular transmissions, modems and even instructional manuals all owe this work a debt of gratitude. Simply put, Shannon and Weaver explain that less noise results in a better transmission, so several mathematical algorithms are posited to reduce noise in communication technology.
The present day information society has defined itself, and has even been constructed upon technologies which require noise reducing mathematical algorithms. These algorithms are so prevalent that we rely on them every day without necessarily noticing or understanding them. As a researcher, I wonder where people embrace noise, as these sites provide clues to the limits of information’s value. Although I can think of many, in light of our recent Blog-O-Versary Mix!, I choose to examine one of my most treasured – the mixtape. The mixtape exemplifies a site of resistance specifically because it is 1)a measureably inferior sonic format to CD, MP3 and vinyl, and 2) often mixtapes are used to encode messages meant for an ideal listener. The communities, couples and individuals who circulate mixtapes embrace its status as an obsolete technology, – they perceive its affiliations with noise as a strength, a contour, definition. Mixtapes are a form of symbolic currency where the message is often secondary to the communal connotations encouraged by its form. Noise can be read as a tactic, a space of densly coded inferences which resist traditional modes of authority. To understand a mixtape is to understand the community and contexts within which it circulates; no other explanation could ever prove adequate.
Shannon and Weaver constructed noise as a problem for communication in 1949, and this has certainly had a strong impact on the term’s meaning, supporting its negative connotations even today. Noise is a space of social resistance and identification, an organic model of social encoding and decoding where authority is subverted to a subcultural set of rules and rituals. Reading Shannon and Weaver makes me question the sociological: how indebted is today’s society to information, and does noise truly serve as a foil?
Here’s the essay Claude Shannon Submitted to Bell Labs: A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Cassette From My Ex is a site which explores some sites of identification in information resistance.
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