Salomé Voegelin & Mark Peter Wright: Leaky knowledge

Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer): Stewardship to obsolescence and preservation

Jacek Smolicki & Candace Campo: Soundscapes as archives

Sounding Female Work – AUDIO ESSAY | Nanna Lysholt Hansen reflects on her live performance »Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_inannainanna (Russ, Shiva, Klein)« where she used her voice to perform mothering towards strangers on a bus while sharing, by mantra singing, eco-feminist thought on the necessity of caring for others in times of planetary crisis.

AUDIO ESSAY: Nanna Lysholt Hansen »Cyborg mother voices and expanded notions of care«

'Solastalgia' is the feeling of emotional or existential distress, experienced as we witness negatively perceived environmental change unfold in places dear to us – audio paper by composer Carola Bauckholt and violinist Karin Hellqvist.

The Audio Paper is part of Seismograf – Sounding Women's Work Part 2

Solastalgia – Audio Paper by Karin Hellqvist and Carola Bauckholt

This audio performance paper queries if the application of sound and music has the potential to evoke and relieve the pain of intergenerational grief. 

Part of Danish magazine Seismograf's open call: GRIEF – Sonic expression of loss, pain, and sadness.

This special issue has invited scholars to reflect upon the theme of »grief« in the format of an audio paper. This format, we thought, would offer authors a possibility to present their research in sound, in a way that gives the theme of grief the opportunity to be heard firsthand, not only described in text. 

According to the four audio papers selected for this issue, the aesthetics and ethics of grief can swirl around communication in crisis, family grief and shame mingled with popular music, and reviving ancient rituals of mourning, namely lamenting.

All audio papers have been peer reviewed by two external anonymous reviewers and edited before publication. They were carefully selected among nine submissions. 

BIO
A PhD practice research student at London College of Music, University of West London, leon clowes (www.leonclowes.com) re-embarked on a career as an artist in 2020. As a transdisciplinary practitioner, researching the employment of auto-ethnography as a self-compassionate artistic tool, they expose lived trauma relating to family, queerness, addictions, and self-abuse. leon’s academic writing has been published in three collections, these being Bloomsbury Academic, Palgrave Macmillan and the experimental popular music journal Riffs.

leon clowes: Secrets Keep Us Sick but Pop Music Brings Us Closer

In this audio essay we interrogate the autoethnographic in soundscapes by engaging with the narratological nature of field recordings in their ability to convey not only affect but also memory, history, and context.

Part of Danish magazine Seismograf's open call: GRIEF – Sonic expression of loss, pain, and sadness.

This special issue has invited scholars to reflect upon the theme of »grief« in the format of an audio paper. This format, we thought, would offer authors a possibility to present their research in sound, in a way that gives the theme of grief the opportunity to be heard firsthand, not only described in text.

According to the four audio papers selected for this issue, the aesthetics and ethics of grief can swirl around communication in crisis, family grief and shame mingled with popular music, and reviving ancient rituals of mourning, namely lamenting.

All audio papers have been peer reviewed by two external anonymous reviewers and edited before publication. They were carefully selected among nine submissions.

BIO
Milena Droumeva is an Associate Professor of Communication and Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography. They have a background in acoustic ecology and work across the fields of urban soundscape research, sonification for public engagement, as well as gender and sound in video games. Milena’s current research combines livability with urban soundscapes research, including sonification of civic data.

Svitlana Matviyenko is faculty at Simon Fraser University in the School of Communication. She teaches and writes on psychoanalysis and cybernetics, information and media theory, posthumanism, and information and cyber warfare. She is associate editor of (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies. Recently, she coedited The Imaginary App (2014) and a special issue of The Fibreculture Journal on »apps and affect« (2015). Currently in Ukraine, Svitlana has been writing a »dispatches of war« academic blog series hosted by the Institute for Networked Cultures: https://networkcultures.org/blog/author/svitlana/

Milena Droumeva & Svitlana Matviyenko: Sonic Worlds Collide – Sounds from Ukraine

This audio paper analyses the emotions of contemporary laments in the context of music and performing arts in Finland, and presents the course of events behind the current practices with audio examples.

Part of Danish magazine Seismograf's open call: GRIEF – Sonic expression of loss, pain, and sadness.

This special issue has invited scholars to reflect upon the theme of »grief« in the format of an audio paper. This format, we thought, would offer authors a possibility to present their research in sound, in a way that gives the theme of grief the opportunity to be heard firsthand, not only described in text.

According to the four audio papers selected for this issue, the aesthetics and ethics of grief can swirl around communication in crisis, family grief and shame mingled with popular music, and reviving ancient rituals of mourning, namely lamenting.

All audio papers have been peer reviewed by two external anonymous reviewers and edited before publication. They were carefully selected among nine submissions.

BIO
Viliina Silvonen is a folklorist specializing in Karelian lament tradition and its sprouts in Finland, interested in tradition in changing sociocultural contexts. In her article-based dissertation (2022) she applied performance, practice, and interdisciplinary affect/emotion theories with bodily methods to analyse the emotions and the affective power of Olonets Karelian on archival audio tapes. Silvonen works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland in a project that studies lament tradition in contemporary Finland founded by Kone Foundation. She is also a member of the multidisciplinary research community of Finnish Literature Society.

Emmi Kuittinen is a folk singer and musician specialized in the Karelian and Ingrian singing styles and especially laments. She holds a master's degree in music. Kuittinen works in a project that studies lament tradition in contemporary Finland and it's founded by Kone Foundation.

Viliina Silvonen & Emmi Kuittinen: Creating grief and lamenting on stage

In this audio paper, we are focusing on a guided lamenting circle, and explore on the meanings that the participants in the circle give to the lament.

Part of Danish magazine Seismograf's open call: GRIEF – Sonic expression of loss, pain, and sadness.

This special issue has invited scholars to reflect upon the theme of »grief« in the format of an audio paper. This format, we thought, would offer authors a possibility to present their research in sound, in a way that gives the theme of grief the opportunity to be heard firsthand, not only described in text.

According to the four audio papers selected for this issue, the aesthetics and ethics of grief can swirl around communication in crisis, family grief and shame mingled with popular music, and reviving ancient rituals of mourning, namely lamenting.

All audio papers have been peer reviewed by two external anonymous reviewers and edited before publication. They were carefully selected among nine submissions.

BIO
Elina Hytönen-Ng is an ethnomusicologist and a cultural researcher who holds a docent title at the University of Turku. 

She has been specialising in musical experiences and performance venues in the contemporary British jazz scene. She has been an academic visitor at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. She received her PhD in 2010 with Professor Steven Feld (Univ. of New Mexico, USA) being the external examiner. 

Currently, she is the primary investigator in a three-year project, funded by Kone Foundation, focusing on lamenting rituals in contemporary Finnish society. 

Emilia Kallonen is a folk singer, modern lamenter, and music pedagogist. She received her degree in folk singing and music pedagogy in Karelia University of Applied Sciences in 2014. She is also a chairwoman of the Äänellä Itkijät association. 

Currently, she is working as a lamenting artist in a three-year project »Kyynelkanavat«, funded by Kone Foundation. On the project, she is a working couple with Elina Hytönen-Ng

Elina Hytönen-Ng & Emilia Kallonen: Lament is like a safe lap

Carlos Manrique Clavijo: Dynamics of Power Dynamics – How are power dynamics evidenced through loudness in sonic storytelling? 

It is through knowledge of the art-form and skilful weaving of networks of symbols, that creatives can dictate the terms of storytelling and thus exert their power over the audience. To be able to engage in the experience of a film, the audience needs to suspend their disbelief and put themselves at the mercy of the film-making team. 

When thinking of power in the context of sound, one of the first elements that comes to mind is loudness. But mere use of loudness to exert authority over the audience's emotions puts the mechanisms of hegemony under the spotlight. Upon closer analysis it becomes apparent that the 'loud' cannot exist without the 'quiet'. So does this also mean that power can be exercised by wielding silence? In film, as well as in real life, those who command silence can exercise power in subtle, more refined and inconspicuous ways.

These landmarks of power struggles in sonic narratives are defined by saliency and it is contrast that gives rise to power: the greater the opposition, the greater the power. The key thus, is not loudness or silence but dynamic range; the scale and contrasts of levels that occur throughout a creative sound piece.

Audio-paper playback note: Due to the themes & content of the piece, some of the sounds can potentially feel suddenly loud (depending on the listener's playback volume). The overall loudness of the pieces is -28 LKFS, with a True Peak value -2.8dBFS.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call series What Sounds Do (2023)

Dynamics of Power Dynamics

Ania Mauruschat: The Heartbeat of the Drum 

For over 4000 years, the Inuit in Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is called in Greenlandic, have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic. Their knowledge of how to survive under such harsh conditions has been preserved and passed on via sound through the millennia. For the Inuit, storytelling and frame drum singing and dancing have sonic agency. They give them the energy they needed to survive and thrive in the cold. The powers of these sounds and their misconception by missionaries and colonizers as addressing pagan or even evil forces led to the ban of the qilaat, the Inuit frame drum, from churches and public spaces. After the suppression of these sounds for around 300 years, in December 2021 Inuit drum dancing and singing has been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But despite this huge acknowledgment, the fight for the revitalization of the qilaat is far from over, as the case of the Greenlandic ex-priest Markus E. Olsen shows.

The Heartbeat of the Drum

I went on an artist residency in Tokyo in 2018/19 for three months and ended up spending most of my time in karaoke boxes. I don’t remember what my actual project was but in the birthplace of karaoke, amateur singing of pop songs was all I could think of.

Karaoke is about taking turns at performing evergreen pop songs and is really more about the performance than about being good at singing. It’s a good example of audience participation performance that actually works. It’s about listening to one’s own voice.

Pop songs are mostly written in the language of Klischees, English. Isn’t it the point that you don’t know what you sing or what it means? Karaoke Collage is created by collaging pieces for texts from other karaoke songs together. When it’s sung, the melody adds another semantic layer to the text, that somehow makes it make sense. Karaoke Collage is an homage to the pop songs that are such mega hits around the globe that they have become cheesy earworms. The lyrics of the song Karaoke Collage is created by fragments of existing karaoke songs in a spolia-like1 process. Reusing the tropes of pop music lyrics, seem to be inherent in the genre of pop music itself.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Karaoke Collage

Francisco Mazza: More Than Background
This audio paper explores the 'acoustic territory' (Labelle, 2010) of Peckham Rye Lane through my sonic journey as a Peckham resident, practitioner, and researcher. My relationship with this place has expanded throughout my studies, moving beyond the simple notion of documentation or representation from an 'outsider' angle. Instead, as a resident, I have apprehended my methodologies of listening and representing sound through my everyday life of living in Peckham and my involvement with different community groups. 

But Why Sound? And Why now?

"With the urgent necessity of communicating places and sounds" (Wright, 2022), here, on the edge of gentrification, displacement and disappearance, this acoustic territory of Peckham Town Centre vibrates to my 'idiosyncratic' position (Schulze, 2018). The one that can be expanded into a broader social-political dimension resonates with grassroots community engagement in Peckham. In this context, amplifying ambience became a methodological tool and critical framework to infuse 'sonic sensibilities' (Voegelin, 2021) into discussions about urban spaces and community engagement as a response to the new 're-generation' plans spreading around London. How can listening be incorporated into community activism as a reflective strategy? And how can the agency of the acoustic environment be articulated in those reflections? 

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

More Than Background

Emery Petchauer & Ruth Nicole Brown: The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by "rejecting the solidity of a frame" (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged between minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance sounds a formless formation, exploring integrity and wholeness among Black and Indigenous collectives that organize via radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about individual moral virtue but rather a collective ontological state of being whole.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole

This audio-paper explores the phenomenon of voice-based technology in the smart-home. Through ethnographic interviews we study how older people use voice-based technologies and with what effects for their experiences of the affective environment in their homes. We followed nine people over the age of 65 online and onsite in their private homes in or nearby Copenhagen during the covid lockdown. We used Google nest smart speakers as cultural probes and followed the participants over the course of six months of integrating and using the new technologies in their homes and everyday lives.  

Marie Ertner, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, Signe L. Yndigegn: Voice as Infrastructure

Our research explores how voice-based technologies participate in creating affective environments in older people’s homes and seeks to address the mundane, unremarkable, and often unspoken experiences and affects related to voice-based technologies and smart homes, which is a largely absent theme in the research on this topic.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Voice as Infrastructure

Morten Poulsen: Fear Of Weakness: Songs To Agitate The Man

In the audio-paper Fear of Weakness: Songs to Agitate the Man, artist Morten Poulsen builds on his project Boys Will Be… (2022), in which he met with young cis-men to have conversations about vulnerability, intimacy and masculine norms. In the end of these meetings, Morten recorded the men giggling, and these recordings were then presented as a sound installation. Listening back to these recordings, and informed by both sound and gender studies, Morten explores the deficiencies of masculinity norms and the fear of being exposed as non-masculine. How might the sound of giggling cultivate a softening of hardened spaces, and encourage a reflection on the way that men relate to each other? How might the sound of giggling men serve as a noise in the patriarchal system?

The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Fear Of Weakness: Songs To Agitate The Man

Operating rooms are typically noise filled environments, where polyrhythms and polyphonics of human and non-human sounds collide. In this paper the operating room soundscape is used for relational ethnographic exploration, framed in critical affect theory, and brings together insights from medical sociology and sound studies.  

This paper is set in an operating theatre where cochlear implantation surgery is taking place. In the process of surgically enabling sound perception.  Sounds within the operating room are found to have agency warranting conscious perception.  Within the composition, we reflect on multiple interdependencies through sound, between individuals, teams, tools and machines.  Through inclusion of human and non-human sounds we see chaos and conflict, independence and co-dependence, and ultimately collaboration in a shared goal of both human and non-human elements to achieve the best outcome for the patient asleep on the operating table.  

In this paper sounds are intrinsic essential actors as sound perception is surgically restored.  Sound is acknowledged in its action as a key component of the operating room team. 

The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Cochlear Implantation Surgery - Soundscapes, Textures And Manipulations

Vita Zelenska: The Limitations of Sonic Offer

The sound of the slogans at the demonstrations touches the body, it is impossible to hide from. The vulnerability revealed through this touch creates immediate affective responses pointing at the limitations of sonic support and solidarization. Despite the trouble of misunderstanding that often comes with sonic action as these limitations become tangible, thinking through sonic clashes also opens possibilities for a better understanding of sonic action.

The audio paper includes recordings from the events in solidarity with migrants and refugees from 2020 to 2022 in Athens, along with the autoethnographic sonic material about a demonstration against the russian invasion into Ukraine. The autoethnographic audio message was not meant for public ear and documents the backstage of institutional knowledge production. This study emphasises the necessity of thinking about the limitations of sonic solidarity as a part of the political agency of sound. It theorises sonic conflict and misunderstanding, questioning solidarization through sound by paying attention to the discrepancies of language and affect.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

The Limitations of Sonic Offer

Olya Zikrata: TO WHOM IT MAY SPEAK: Scenes of Ukrainian truth, and terror

This audio paper narrates through the experiences and ambiences of Russian aggression to which Ukrainians relate a long history of Russia’s imperial statehood. (Plokhy, 2023) It seeks a space of ethics in which sound expresses and gives testimonial to Ukrainian tragedy. In February 2023, Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko wrote an essay in which she claimed a justice-seeking quality to “cruel”, and “poor”, images, contesting a particular labeling of the images as “sensitive content”. (Iakovlenko, 2023) The audio paper resonates with Iakovlenko’s discussion, seeking a similar quality in “cruel”, and “poor”, sounds which were recorded hastily to make the war traceable in the experience of its victims. These sounds are not to be assessed for value-producing acoustics but fathomed in the actuality of ruination. 

I take ruination as a sonic state and worldly entanglement, mobilizing it as a force against which powers of resistance are measured. The audio paper invests in the exploration of Ukrainian resistance, locating in the world-ruining times a sonority of the Ukrainian desire to live and Russia’s genocidal intent to end Ukrainian living. 

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

TO WHOM IT MAY SPEAK: Scenes of Ukrainian truth, and terror

Nicole De Brabandere & Graham Flett: Hearing on the Verge. Cuing and Aligning with the Movement of the Audible
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Nicole de Brabandere & Graham Flett: Hearing on the Verge.

Jakob Kreutzfeldt & Sandra Lori Petersen: "Like Sitting Inside a Phone"
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Jakob Kreutzfeldt & Sandra Lori Petersen: "Like Sitting Inside a Phone"

Anne Robinson: Through the air with the greatest of ease: phonogenie.
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Anne Robinson: Through the air with the greatest of ease: phonogenie

Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira: The New “Amagerkaner”. Auditory Ghosts 1 of Amager.
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira: The New Amagerkaner

Rasmus Holmboe & Jan Stricker: Between Maps and Territories
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Rasmus Holmboe & Jan Stricker: Between Maps and Territories

Alexandra Baixinho & Tine Blom: Mountain meets urban waterfront
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

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