Sonic Spaces Seminar Series

Wednesday, 10 March 2021, 7 – 8pm

A panel discussion as part of the ‘Sonic Spaces’ series. 

Discourse around gender and sound often reflects biases about who should be allowed to take up sonic space: from historical assumptions that women’s voices were unsuitable for the radio, to contemporary biases in institutional policies that work to exclude the work of women in the music industry, as well as continued critiques of female speaking voices for expressing unappealing vocal traits like “uptalk” and “vocal fry”.  

This event will bring together a diverse panel to discuss these and other ways in which sonic spaces can reflect broader social and cultural issues around gender and representation: Dr. Megan McGurk, host of the popular podcast and film club, “Sass Mouth Dames”, devoted to women who ruled the Hollywood box office from the 1930s-1950s; Dr. Ann Cleare, a multi-award-winning composer and Assistant Professor in Trinity’s Music and Media Technologies programme who will introduce “Sounding the Feminists,” an Irish-based collective committed to promoting and publicising the creative work of female musicians; and Dr. Jilly Boyce Kay, Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester and author of Gender, Media and Voice (2020), who will discuss the ways that feminist voices on television were construed as “domestic nags” in the 1970s.  The panel will be chaired by Dr. Ciara Barrett, a scholar of gender and screen media and lecturer in film studies with the Dingle Hub and Sacred Heart University.
 
‘Sonic Spaces’ is organised by Jennifer O’Meara, Department of Film, as part of the Creative Arts Practice Research theme. The series considers the creative possibilities of audio and sound culture as they relate to issues of society, technology, the environment and the body. It aims to encourage the academic and broader community to reflect on our relationship to listening and its significance. ‘Sonic Spaces’ is supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH| Sonic Spaces |Gendered Soundscapes

Recorded November 4, 2020.

A panel discussion as part of the ‘Sonic Spaces’ series. 
 
A rise in the number of sound-focused cultural productions is one of the key trends to emerge in the performing arts in recent years, including the reworking of various literary works and figures in the direction of sound and music centred experiences. How do artists and practitioners adapt written works into coherent listening experiences? What principles of sound design guide the development of creative soundscapes for the performing arts? A panel of established creative practitioners discuss these and related issues: Evangelia Rigaki, Head of Music at Trinity, who will discuss her installation opera This Hostel Life (Irish National Opera, 2019) based on Melatu Uche Okorie’s book of the same name; Kevin Gleeson, a prominent sound designer for theatre and film, who will discuss recent collaborations with Dead Centre (Hamnet, Beckett’s Room, To Be A Machine); and Nicholas Johnson, Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity and co-founder of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, who will discuss his recent dramaturgical work on Beckett’s Room, a sound-focused play and co-production of Dead Centre and Gate Theatre. The panel will be chaired by Ruth Barton, Head of School of the Creative Arts at Trinity.  

‘Sonic Spaces’ is organised by Jennifer O’Meara, Department of Film, as part of the Creative Arts Practice Research theme. It is supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH | Sonic Spaces | Soundscapes of the Performing Arts

Wednesday, 2 December 2020, 7 – 8pm

A panel discussion as part of the ‘Sonic Spaces’ series. 
Wind-up music boxes; phonograph cylinders; gramophones; microphones; radio; magnetic tape; compact discs; MP3 players; synthetic voices. These are just a few of the sound technologies that have framed our experience of listening since the 19th century until the present day. And while audio transmission and recording processes have increasingly moved from analogue to digital systems, the cross-disciplinary nature of sound technologies remains. Frequently dependent on the technical expertise of audio engineers, such technologies heavily shape the media industries and, indeed, our daily lives.

This event will bring together a diverse panel of experts to discuss their experiences of employing sound technologies in creative ways: Enda Bates, deputy director of Trinity’s Music and Media Technologies programme, who will discuss his use of spatialized audio in 360-degree music videos; Zeynep Bulut (Queen's University Belfast) will discuss the collaborative research initiative Map a Voice, which explores sonic and social interactions between voice and environment; Mattia Cobianchi (Goldsmiths University and acoustic engineer at Bowers & Wilkins) on his historical sound project ‘London Street Noises’; and Neasa Ní Chiarain, from Trinity’s Phonetics & Speech Laboratory, who will discuss the ABAIR.ie Irish language learning website, and the development of synthesized voices for Irish.  
 
The panel will be chaired by Linda Doyle, Professor of Engineering & The Arts at Trinity, and the founder Director of the SFI Research Centre CONNECT, a national research centre focused on telecommunications. 

‘Sonic Spaces’ is organised by Jennifer O’Meara, Department of Film, as part of the Creative Arts Practice Research theme. The series considers the creative possibilities of audio and sound culture as they relate to issues of society, technology, the environment and the body. It aims to encourage the academic and broader community to reflect on our relationship to listening and its significance. ‘Sonic Spaces’ is supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

TLRH| Sonic Spaces | Sound & Technology

Wednesday, 10 February 2021, 7 – 8pm

A panel discussion as part of the ‘Sonic Spaces’ series. 
From the soothing sounds of lapping waves and bird song, to the uncomfortable disruption of construction work and traffic, our daily lives are subject to a wide range of natural and man-made environmental sounds. The impact of such sounds on human well-being has led to a range of interventions in recent years. These include an EU directive to examine public noise exposure through the creation of noise maps, and artistic initiatives to introduce professional live music into hospital settings to improve patients’ experience.

This event will bring together a multi-disciplinary panel to discuss a range of works that emerge from, or aim to benefit, our experience of listening in natural, urban and social environments: Laurence Gill, Professor in Environmental Engineering at Trinity, and composer Norah Walsh who will discuss their collaboration on ‘Inception Horizon,’ which used an understanding of the movement of water through limestone as the basis of a choral piece inspired by a karst cave system in County Clare; Antonella Radicchi, an architect and scholar based at TU Berlin, and Simon Jennings, Executive Scientist in the Environment Section of Limerick County Council, who will introduce the ‘Hush City’ app which empowers people to identify and assess quiet areas in cities including Limerick; and Gráinne Hope, an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at Trinity’s Global Brain Health Institute, who will discuss her work as founder and artistic director of ‘Kids’ Classics’, Ireland’s leading music in healthcare organization. 
 
The panel will be chaired by Jimmy Eadie, an artist-engineer based in Trinity’s Electronic & Electrical Engineering programme, who works within the field of recording, production and sound design.  

 
‘Sonic Spaces’ is organised by Jennifer O’Meara, Department of Film, as part of the Creative Arts Practice Research theme. The series considers the creative possibilities of audio and sound culture as they relate to issues of society, technology, the environment and the body. It aims to encourage the academic and broader community to reflect on our relationship to listening and its significance. ‘Sonic Spaces’ is supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

Sonic Spaces |Sounds of the Environment

Founded in 2006, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute is dedicated to advancing Trinity College Dublin’s rich tradition of research excellence in the Arts and Humanities, on an individual, collaborative and inter-disciplinary basis.

Sonic Spaces Seminar Series

TLRHub