Examining Narrative Sonification: Using First-Person Retrospection Methods to Translate Radio Production to Interaction Design

We present a first-person, retrospective exploration of two radio sonification pieces that employ narrative scaffolding to teach audiences how to listen to data. To decelerate and articulate design processes that occurred at the rapid pace of radio production, the sound designer and producer wrote retrospective design accounts. We then revisited the radio pieces through principles drawn from guidance design, data storytelling, visualization literacy, and sound studies. Finally, we speculated how these principles might be applied through interactive, voice-based technologies. First-person methods enabled us to access the implicit knowledge embedded in radio production and translate it to technologies of interest to the human–computer-interaction community, such as voice user interfaces that rely on auditory display. Traditionally, sonification practitioners have focused more on generating sounds than on teaching people how to listen; our process, however, treated sound and narrative as a holistic, sonic-narrative experience. Our first-person retrospection illuminated the role of narrative in designing to support people as they learn to listen to data.

Elementy dźwiękosfery górskiej w poezji Juliana Przybosia

The article is an attempt to explore and describe the audio motifs in mountain poems by Julian Przyboś. The author, using the methodological achievements of the anthropology of sound, attempts to analyze and interpret poems devoted to the mountains. The article presents a number of concepts developed by the sound studies’ methodology, such as audiosphere, phonosphere, sonosphere, soundscape, or galenosphere. The text clearly demonstrates the existence of Przyboś’s ideas about the world of sounds which the poet contained both in his poems and his program texts. Particularly noteworthy is the poet’s conceptualization of silence and silence in the mountain space.

Indian Ocean Listening Stations: Governmental Ears, Surveillance Acoustemologies, and the Maritime Silk Road

In this article, I examine the discourse surrounding “listening stations” (surveillance outposts) that the Indian government has built to counter Chinese infrastructural projects in the Indian Ocean. As surveillance technologies are placed on out-of-the-way islands and deep underwater, the ocean is discursively situated in the press and diplomatic circles as a site where the geopolitical and sonic ‘noise’ of the metropole is evaded in virtue of the seeming fidelity of the sea, thus garnering potential for the listening stations to reveal China’s true geopolitical intentions. Drawing on classic securitization theory, as well as writings in the anthropology of security and sound studies, I argue that the positioning of listening stations as sites defined by listening and protection from Chinese encroachment obfuscates how they function as geopolitical speech and an expansion of Indian power. I coin the term “surveillance acoustemology” to refer to the ways that India’s listening stations spatialize India’s projected influence and its ability to hear its Chinese rival across the Indian Ocean.

Auditory Resonance: A Transdisciplinary Concept?

Focusing on the influential work of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, as well as on selected positions in sound studies, this essay explores some aspects of auditory resonance, an over-determined concept exemplified by music that no single conceptual framework can exhaustively explain. For this reason, transdisciplinary research is especially productive in exploring the wide range of auditory resonance if it does not adhere to a seemingly all-inclusive theoretical self-definition but starts from an actual, singular experience. This subjective, even personal response to auditory resonance opens up various intersecting, supplementary, and often competing paradigms of critical analysis that interrogate any hegemonic claims to perspectives and insights potentially implied in single-disciplinary methodologies.

Habitat and Experience

This contribution provides a contemporary introduction into research and artistic practices related to the study of sonic agglomerations from the perspective of an anthropology of sound. The article has four parts within which its author traverses and experiences an agglomeration such as Copenhagen by employing the very methods, practices and explorative approaches that are introduced in this article. Starting with “Spatial Volumes, Secluded and Eroding“ (part 1), the author focuses then on “Protocol and Dérive“ (part 2), „The Noise of the Other“ (part 3), “An Escape to Recreate” (part 4) and asks toward the end the question “What Might a City Be?” In this way the urban sonic experience is unfolded through recent research approaches within or close to the field of sound studies.

Jotería Listening

This essay is a mapping of Latinx queer listening practices and spaces, such as bars and restaurants, as forms of resistance to gentrification in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Using a framework called “joteria listening,” and following the route of a performance event and ritual called LA Queer Posada in 2011, the author charts a sonic trail composed of sounds, songs, and memories of places and people in Silver Lake displaced by gentrification and historical erasure. Drawing from sound studies, performance studies and joteria studies, and using oral histories, interviews, archival sources, and ethnography, this essay offers innovative ways to think of queer Latinx sound and space as it adds layers to the palimpsestic map of Silver Lake and beyond. While listening to urban hauntings, sounds of loss, celebration and resistance, it offers new ways of remembering, performing and imagining community, futurity, and a more just world.

Introduction

This introduction delineates the three main pillars of the book. Red music is defined within the context of the Vietnamese music industry and compared with propaganda music in other communist countries. The concept of a continuous revolution is described through reference to literature from political thinkers in Vietnam and the wider communist world. Radio and the voice are assessed as key themes in recent anthropological studies. This is followed by a review of the social history of sound reproduction, which is considered in the fields of ethnomusicology, sound studies, radio studies, and related fields. After outlining the research methodology (ethnographic and archival approaches) and structure of the book, the introduction concludes with notes on language, recordings, and musical transcriptions.

Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Introduction

This book argues that Native ways of doing music history requires relational and radical ways of listening to and for the density of Indigeneity. To advance a more Indigenized sound studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies asks researchers to prioritize analytics of density and audibility, and to hear performances of Indigeneity intimately intertwined articulations of Peoples (ways of being), places/spaces (ways of knowing), and projects (ways of doing). When Indigeneity is understood as more than simply the “condition of being Indigenous,” it becomes possible to emphasize structures of Indigeneity and to operationalize Indigenous logics, or what one might call Indigelogics. Indigelogical ways of doing music history are some of many ongoing projects seeking to unsettle and decolonize dominant narratives, and reframe larger debates of race, Indigeneity, power, and representation in twenty-first-century American music historiography. Sound Relations offers Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered terms of engagement as pathways to resurgent world-making and more equitable futures for all human and more-than-human kin.