Where Is This Now, Now?: Gertrude Stein's Literary Innovations and New Sound Media

This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein's literary innovations and the new sound media of her time. By examining these connections, this article looks at Stein's compositional techniques—in particular her concept of the continuous present and her lifelong interest in speech and dialogue—to examine how new media technologies intersected with her attempt to change the way writing was written, read, and heard. By focusing on sound, and looking specifically at her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), this article reads Stein's innovative poetics against the backdrop of concurrent changes to audio technologies during her career. Finally, the article argues that by paying attention to the ongoing shifts in media ecologies in relation to modernist innovations, we might gain insight into the larger phenomenological and sensorial sphere that formed the backdrop to modernism.

Quantifying Auditory Presence Using Electroencephalography

Presence is used to assess the subjective experience of being in one place when physically situated in another. Recently, the research on presence has gained increasing attention due to the wide use of immersive audio technologies. Currently, the most widely-used measurement of presence is based on post-experiment self-report questionnaires. It is reliable but imperfect due to the psychological changes caused by the act of answering the questionnaire when immersed in the virtual environment. Therefore, the present work aims to find an objective way to measure presence, and electroencephalography (EEG) was investigated as a possible tool for this objective measurement. In this study, two listening tests were conducted, where eight loudspeakers were used to reproduce urban soundscapes to stimulate auditory presence. Presence was measured by both questionnaires and EEG. Results showed a significant correlation between T/B (Theta/Beta Ratio) extracted from EEG and subjective presence levels assessed by questionnaires, suggesting the possible use of EEG to measure presence objectively. This study could bring some insight for the research of presence, and related technologies, such as VR, video games and immersive audio production.

The Black Queer/Trans Femme Representation of Beyoncé’s Media Ventriloquisms and the National Voice

This chapter historicizes the Black diva and the relationship forged between Beyoncé’s singing voice, audio technologies, and the nation. In particular, audiences might receive enhanced voice placed back upon the live performing body of a singer as a national offense until they consider the Black queer/trans femme tradition of gender (re)presentation. Fallout from Black, feminized divas across history who use audio technologies—Beyoncé’s 2013 “lip-synced” performance at President Barack Obama’s inauguration and Marian Anderson’s 1939 Lincoln Memorial outdoor concert—reveals the complexity of media ventriloquism alongside sexist, racist, transphobic, and femmephobic bias. Through debates commentators discussed the appropriateness of Beyoncé’s enhanced body as a gendered, femme icon—namely, why should the Black diva be limited to singing or appearing in a state of naturalness and not artifice? By tracing these debates, we may explore how national outrage persists surrounding the mediatized voice of Black women performers despite our current sensorium infused with media.

The “Trickality” of Listening in Early Musical Trick Films

This chapter considers a small but distinct body of music-themed “trick films” that involve imaginative visualizations of music, sometimes also of the marvels and problems associated with new audio technologies. Exponents of the early “trick film” genre Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón saw the potential for film to facilitate both visual and audio-visual tricks, despite the medium’s material silence. The chapter suggests that the ubiquity of musical and vocal themes in early films, with sound visually materialized in imaginative ways, may reflect the fact that film-makers were struck by the inherent joke of the audio-visual incongruity created by a silent medium that displayed scenes taking place in a hearing world. These films often focused on new audio technologies, for which the opposite audio-visual relationship was true: sounds (re)produced by audio technologies lacked their visual source. For films involving sound reproduction subjects, there was a double incongruity—and perhaps, double the pleasure.

Editorial: Rendering Sounds, Sales and Instructional Capabilities in a Virtual World

JVWR Assembled 2020 presents our final contribution to a focused effort within the capacity of Virtual Worlds. This issue includes three articles covering 360 audio technologies, instructional use, and the topic of purchase intentions in Virtual Worlds. The issue is led by devoted research partners who have worked together previously. Dr. Angie Cox, Professor of Business Technology and Process Improvement & Professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology, acts as the prime editor. Dr. Ryan Durbin, at the Washington State Patrol, and Dr. Vernell Hall, of Trident American Intercontinental University, act as the co-editors.

Critique of podcasting as an anthropological method

Digital audio technologies have expanded the methodological possibilities for anthropological research. This article explores some of the implications of using podcasting as an anthropological method, specifically an experiment in which interlocutor interviews were regularly published as part of an exploration into digital politics in India. The article uses the reflexive insights garnered from making the series to interrogate the possibilities of interlocutor interview podcasting for anthropology. Further to this, it exploits the interlocutors’ expertise on digital practices to reverse the analytical gaze, asking what their experiences of the digitalising Indian public sphere can teach us about changing academic/anthropological practices, especially regarding the enabling (or not) of new ways of speaking, vocal performances, the possibility for immediate publishing, and celebrations of newness. Building from these critical appraisals, it is suggested that the latent promise of interlocutor interview podcasting lies in the potential to create ‘aural intimacy' and a ‘circulating copresence'.

Sound Quality, Language, and Cognitive Metaphors

As Mads Walther-Hansen makes clear, we regularly make use of cognitive metaphors when appraising sound quality. For example, nonauditory descriptors such as warm, cold, and rough might be used to describe auditory parameters, such as when assessing loudspeakers. Equally, we measure such assessments of sound quality against an ideal that, so we are told, is grounded in past sensory-motor experience. However, as Walther-Hansen argues, this explanation is problematic when viewed in light of evolving audio technologies because the cognitive structures behind value- and sense-making are themselves evolving hand-in-hand with those technologies. His focus, therefore, is on the processes of structural coupling that take place between imagined cognitive ideals of sound quality and ever-changing external factors. Walther-Hansen’s thesis is that, in order to explain this process, language should be viewed as a fundamental part of cognitive processing rather than merely being controlled by it.

A Mellow Bit of Rhythm

This concluding chapter considers the 1957 album, A Mellow Bit of Rhythm, as a Signifyin(g) form of musical recollection. It rounded off the recorded output of Kirk as a bandleader in a way that re-illuminated the earlier recordings made by his Clouds of Joy within a 1950s hot-jazz context. The retrospective album is shown to be as much a form of stylistic mask-play as the original recordings, as it served to represent a particular kind of ‘authentic’ black-jazz legacy for Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy within contemporary stylistic parameters and expectations. The bigger band and its more voluminous sound are considered relative to contemporary audio technologies and tastes and the louder big-band style is shown to re-present Kirk’s recordings of the previous two decades in fresh stylistic and racial garb. Exploring that album ultimately presents an opportunity to reflect on the whole race-political enterprise of the records of Kirk and his band.