[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Sonic Paths

[Marcus Boon]

Thanks to Tim and Renate for inviting us to participate in empyre this week!

When Tim and Renate asked me what directions my own interest in sound studies were taking, I thought immediately about Douglas Kahn's new book Earth Sound, Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, which U. California published a few months ago.  I've been interested in expanded ideas of sound studies for a while, particularly in thinking about vibration as it relates to popular and experimental music scenes -- partly under the influence of Steve Goodman and his fascinating book Sonic Warfare, which MIT published a few years ago.  I've been talking with Nina Eidsheim for several years now, and was struck by her work on vibration and singing/performance (which will be published in her forthcoming book Sensing Sound).  So I thought it'd be interesting to have a conversation about different ideas re. an expanded field of sound studies, that would include different frameworks of physical or other forces that in some way underlie what we call sound.  When I suggested this to Doug, he immediately pointed out to me that for him, it's not (just) about vibration, or sound as a particular kind of vibration ... but a three part framework: vibration, inscription and transmission, that he uses to think different technocultural practices.  What he's given us is a history of visual and sonic arts that mobilize the electromagnetic spectrum in different ways.  That (to me) is a major expansion of what constitutes possible materials or matters of concern when it comes to making art.

So I'd like to begin by asking Doug and Nina to talk a little about expanded frameworks of sound studies ... how do they think about that? What's at stake in shifting the parameters?

For myself, I'll save the details for a later post, but I'm intrigued by what Goodman calls "the politics of sub-frequency". Where he focuses on warfare and violence, I'm interested in the erotics of sub frequency ... the kinds of intimacy that are sustained through sound and vibration in subcultural and experimental music scenes.  But also the limits of that ... a kind of resistance to vibration, to being touched by it, that one notices especially with drone music, which still makes a lot of people uncomfortable ... or "bored" ....

One note. Doug is in Sydney, Australia, Nina is in LA, I am in Montreal ... so expect some significant lags ... and of course, respond to us or ask us to explain ourselves whenever you like.

More soon ....





On 2014-06-09, at 10:58 AM, Renate Ferro wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Sent from my iPad
> Week two on - empyre.  
> Welcome to our moderator Marcus Boon.  Marcus has invited Nina 
> Eidsheim and Douglas Kahn to discuss the Douglas Kahn's new book,  "Earth Sound, Earth Signal.". This book proposes a significant expansion of the field of sound studies (as well as the visual arts) by revealing the history of arts and artists that mobilize the electromagnetic spectrum.  Douglas will discuss his work with Nina Eidsheim, author of the forthcoming Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke UP) and Marcus Boon, author of In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP) and the forthcoming Politics of Vibration.  We will think about sound studies and new media within Kahn's framework of vibration, inscription and transmission, and reflect on its implications for aesthetic theory and practice.Nina Sun Eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. She is currently working on these ideas and repertoires in two monograph projects entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines.
> 
> Welcome Marcus, Nina, and Douglas!
> 
> Biographies for this week:
> Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University in Toronto.  He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard UP, 2002) and In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010), and co-author with Timothy Morton and Eric Cazdyn, of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (U. Chicago, forthcoming).  He writes about music and sound for The Wire, Boing Boing, Bomb and others.  He was a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, 2011-12.  www.marcusboon.com.  
> 
> Nina Sun Eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. She is currently working on these ideas and repertoires in two monograph projects entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines.
> Douglas Kahn is Professor and Australia Research Council Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His authored and edited books include Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe: Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (UC Press, 2012); Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (UC Press, 2011) and Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992).  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006) and an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation (2009). 
> 
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