Intimate Listening

2021 ◽  
pp. 436-450
Author(s):  
Mark Paterson

Space and proximity are entangled in the idea of listening. First, I set up the relationship between intimacy and listening through Jean-Luc Nancy. Second, I consider highlights of nineteenth-century discoveries in the history of physiology and functional anatomy of the cochlea and the labyrinth of the inner ear, those spaces and chambers whose non-auditory function was determined only through painstaking experimentation. This leads to Michel Serres’ consideration of the interior and exterior noise of the body, including a proprioceptive hearing of intimate personal sounds through skin, bone, feet, and muscle, a bodily interior that resonates like boxes (boîtes). Third, I apply this shared intimacy of listening to a few examples of sound art that explore resonances across sensory modalities and bodily spaces, including the work of Jacob Kirkegaard, who employs the phenomenon of otoacoustic emission (OAE), and Adam Basanta.

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-374
Author(s):  
David Kennerley

AbstractMusic has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 1113-1129
Author(s):  
Kali Murray

This essay considers what tools should be used to study the legal history of intellectual property. I identify three historiographical strategies: narration, contest, and formation. Narration identifies the diverse “narrative structures” that shape the field of intellectual property history. Contest highlights how the inherent instability of intellectual property as a legal concept prompts recurrent debates over its meaning. Formation recognizes how intellectual property historians can offer insight into broader legal history debates over how to consider the relationship between informal social practices and formalized legal mechanisms. I consider Kara W. Swanson's Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk and Sperm in Modern America (2014) in light of these historiographical strategies and conclude that Swanson's book guides us to a new conversation in the legal history of intellectual property law.


2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Lonsdale ◽  
E-Liisa Laakso ◽  
Vanessa Tomlinson

Major studies have shown that flutists report playing-related pain in the neck, middle/upper back, shoulders, wrists, and hands. The current survey was designed to establish the injury concerns of flute players and teachers of all backgrounds, as well as their knowledge and awareness of injury prevention and management. Questions addressed a range of issues including education, history of injuries, preventative and management strategies, lifestyle factors, and teaching methods. At the time of the survey, 26.7% of all respondents were suffering from flute playing-related discomfort or pain; 49.7% had experienced flute playing-related discomfort or pain that was severe enough to distract while performing; and 25.8% had taken an extended period of time off playing because of discomfort or pain. Consistent with earlier studies, the most common pain sites were the fingers, hands, arms, neck, middle/upper back, and shoulders. Further research is needed to establish possible links between sex, instrument types, and ergonomic set up. Further investigation is recommended to ascertain whether certain types of physical training, education, and practice approaches may be more suitable than current methods. A longitudinal study researching the relationship between early education, playing position, ergonomic set-up, and prevalence of injury is recommended.


Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category of the body itself as historically emergent. Bruno Snell argued that Homer lacked a concept of the body (sōma), but it is the emergence of body in the fifth century BCE rather than the appearance of mind or soul that is most consequential for the shape of ancient dualisms. The body takes shape in Hippocratic medical writing as largely hidden and unconscious interior space governed by impersonal forces. But Plato’s corpus demonstrates that while Plato’s reputation as a somatophobe is well grounded and may arise in part from the way the body takes shape in medical and other physiological writing, the Dialogues represent a more complex position on the relationship between body and soul than Plato’s reputation suggests.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This Introduction takes a broadly focused, global, and comparative view of the concept of embodiment, focusing particularly on some of the ways it has been interpreted outside of the history of European thought. It also provides a general overview of the central concerns and questions of the volume as a whole, such as: What is the historical and conceptual relationship between the idea of embodiment and the idea of subjecthood? Am I who I am principally in virtue of the fact that I have the body I have? Relatedly, what is the relationship of embodiment to being and to individuality? Is embodiment a necessary condition of being? Of being an individual? What are the theological dimensions of embodiment? To what extent has the concept of embodiment been deployed in the history of philosophy to contrast the created world with the state of existence enjoyed by God? What are the normative dimensions of theories of embodiment? To what extent is the problem of embodiment a distinctly western preoccupation?


2013 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Curnow

This article explores the origins and early development of the cult of Asclepius. Most of the relevant materials are found in classical literature, although archaeology can also help to shine some light on certain areas. Unsurprisingly, the origins of the cult are quite obscure. A number,of places in ancient Greece competed for the honour of being his birthplace, and there is no conclusive reason for deciding in favour of any of them. One thing that is constant in the stories told about him is that Apollo was usually his father. Another constant in the history of the cult is the practice of incubation. It seems likely that the cult brought together and combined elements of several healing cults that were originally quite separate. The cult emerged at the same time that Hippocratic medicine was developing. A new understanding of the nature of the soul, and the relationship between it and the body was also taking root. It is reasonable to believe that these facts are related, although harder to say exactly how.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitaly Voinov

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between the concepts of ‘seeing’ and ‘attempting/trying’ in various languages. These concepts have so far been found to be co-lexified in languages spoken in Eurasia, Papua New Guinea, India and West Africa, with an added implicature of politeness present in some languages when this lexical item is used in directives. After establishing a cross-linguistic sample, the paper proposes a specific grammaticalization mechanism as responsible for producing this semantic relationship. The explanation centers on a process involving metaphorical transfer, the loss of semantic features, generalization, and a specific syntactic context conducive to this meaning shift. First, the Mind-as-Body metaphor is applied to the mind-related notion of ‘seeing an object’ to derive the body-related notion of ‘controlling an object’, as has previously been demonstrated to be the case in the history of certain Indo-European languages. Second, semantic bleaching causes the meaning component of physical sight to be lost from the overall meaning of the morpheme, and semantic generalization allows attempted actions to be mentally treated the same as physical objects that are manipulated. Finally, the context in which this meaning shift occurs is posited as constructions involving multiverbs, such as serial verbs or converbs.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAGO GIL AGUADO

This article reveals that the diplomatic and financial history of 1931 was even more turbulent than believed to date. New documents found at the Bank of England show that an intricate system of cross-deposits was set up by the Austrian Central Bank covertly to direct funds to the Creditanstalt via American and British banks – to compensate it for taking over the bankrupt Bodencreditanstalt – suggesting that the received accounts of the collapse of the Creditanstalt need to be revised. Further, documents have come to light which show that France exacerbated the 1931 run on the Austrian schilling in order to force Austria to abandon the Austro-German customs union project of that year. This article considers the relationship between the collapse of the Creditanstalt and the abandonment of the Austro-German customs union, incorporating the new evidence to provide a novel interpretation of the financial diplomacy of that year.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Biljana Srećković

This paper is devoted to perceiving the relationship between music and architecture, namely, the discourses which interpret, research, value these two practices in the context of their mutual networking. In that respect it is possible to set aside several problem strongholds which will make the focus of this paper, and which concern: the history of forming and evolution of discourse on the inter-relationship of these two practices; modernist, avant-garde and postmodernist problematization of music and architecture; theories of the artists as a field of music and architecture networking; the interaction of music and architecture on the technical and formal level; spatiality of sound, i.e., sound/music propagation in space and the emergence of the new art concepts based on this principle (sound architecture, aural architecture, sound art).


1979 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
J Grocott

The relationship between metamorphic grade and deformation is examined for shear belts occurring in Precambrian shields. A particular case, where isotherms have fallen continuously relative to an originally horizontal datum surface, for some time prior to the initiation of the shear belt and throughout its life, is examined in detail. Such behaviour of isotherms appears to be common. A type of syn-tectonic metamorphic boundary occurring within shear belts and not coinciding with a strain gradient is discussed in detail. Such boundaries are called active facies boundaries, as mineral assemblages on each side tend to maintain perfect equilibrium with metamorphic conditions during deformation. The orientation of active facies boundaries depends on the vertical displacement rate. In ductile thrust zones horizontal gradients in metamorphic conditions can be set up, and folIowing erosion once active facies boundaries may be exposed. The metamorphic history of rocks in such zones will vary vertically, and, under certain circumstances, laterally. A model is set up to predict these variations, and is applied to the northem boundary of the Ikertoq shear belt, western Greenland.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document