Sociosonic Interventions: Distributed Authorship in Socially Engaged Sound Practices

How do creative sound practices function in the context of socially engaged art? Toward developing a practical methodology, this paper focuses on sound-led projects that stage socially engaged art practice in community settings, including some involving the author. Aesthetics, ethics and politics are employed as interrogative lenses for distributed creative processes. Methods for collaborative art-making that facilitate a balance between these lenses are discussed, with the author further arguing the necessity of artistic “disruption.” Such sociosonic interventions are demonstrated to occur most effectively when sound practices challenge the paradigm of unidirectional audial reproduction: rupturing traditional hierarchies of creator and listener.

The Hearing Test: Evidence of a Vegetal Entity

The author's artistic experiment The Hearing Test focuses on detection of high frequency clicking sounds that are emitted by the tips of plants' roots. Scientists have claimed that plants' roots produce high frequency clicks between 20 and 300 kHz by bursting air bubbles. But while the phenomenon has been described, its cause remains unexplained. This lack of knowledge opens up possibilities for multiple interpretations and invites experimental approaches as well as speculation concerning plant intelligence, the role of species-specific hearing and sound as evidence. The article is an extended reflection on the experiment.

Now I'm Digital, Where Is My Ritual?: Exploring Postdigital Performance Objects as Totems for Agency and Ritual

The author argues that significant aspects of electronic music performance have been diminished in the rush to incorporate the latest, often discreet (as in intentionally unobtrusive) technologies. He identifies these aspects as agency, ritual and, to a lesser extent, serendipity and mess. Using references to his own work, he suggests that applying an understanding of how actors create totems to present agency and affordance is essential to regain, and possibly acclimate, these tools and practices so they are relevant to live electronic music performance practice in a contemporary technology environment.

Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear

This article investigates a turn from eye to ear in the literature and practice of walking-as-art. Arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world, the author examines the practice of soundwalking (Westerkamp) and Deep Listening (Oliveros), placing them in conversation with the work of Michel de Certeau, and concludes with a discussion of the creative projects of Suzanne Thorpe, Viv Corringham and Amanda Gutierrez in order to chart the importance of relational listening practices today.

Music as Epistemic Construct: From Sonic Experience to Musical Sense-Making

Taking an epistemological stance towards music in a real-time listening situation entails a definition of music as a temporal and sounding art. This means that music cannot be described in abstract and detached terms as something “out there” in a virtual space but rather as something that impinges upon our senses in an actual “here and now.” Musical sense-making, therefore, should be considered a kind of ongoing knowledge construction with a dynamic tension between actual sensation and mental representation of sounding events. Four major dichotomies may be considered in this regard: the focal versus synoptic overview of the sounding music, the continuous/discrete processing of the sounds, the distinction between sensory experience versus cognitive economy, and the in-time/outside-of-time distinction. The author argues that a deliberate combination of these diverging approaches makes the musical experience a richer one.

Sounding Time: Explorations in Audio Time-Lapse and Temporal Layering in Interdisciplinary Collaboration

In this article, Evelyn Ficarra considers her compositional practice, giving particular emphasis to the techniques and aesthetics of using time-lapse media and other temporal manipulations in interdisciplinary contexts. Foregrounding her collaboration with media artist Ian Winters on the large-scale interdisciplinary installation/performance Summer, Winter, Spring, Ficarra describes her attempt to model audio-temporal methods on techniques borrowed from the visual realm. She considers temporal compression, extension and layering as compositional tools, highlighting issues of scale, structure and experience, and suggests that radical temporal manipulations of material can serve to bridge referential and abstract sound worlds. Ficarra concludes with reflections on the meanings and poetic resonances of time-lapse media.

Microbial Sensing: Constructing Perception through Technological Layers

The author introduces the concept of looking without seeing to describe the layered use of technology required to experience microorganisms during the making of The Stars Beneath Our Feet: an audiovisual installation for Lumiere Durham, a four-day international light festival produced by Artichoke in the U.K. First, the author describes the experience of technological layering when attempting to perceive microorganisms in the visual field and then the methodology adopted to determine how the same microorganisms might be perceived in the auditory field. The conclusion describes the author's sense of being with the organism as a form of constructed perception in the context of “looking for” and “listening for” microorganisms through an expanded technological frame.

Interspecies Bodies and Watery Sonospheres: Listening in the Lab, the Archives and the Field

In this text, the author brings together scientific interspecies communication experiments, artistic practice and feminist posthumanities to inquire into the transformative role of sound and listening. Departing from an archive with recordings of human-dolphin language experiments, this research attends to sound as evidence and listening as a situated knowledge practice, with ethico-political implications that trouble Western, visually oriented knowledge systems. By imploding interfaces into situations of shared surfaces, the author directs attention to the logics of the skin to bring forth matters of care and suggest how listening might contribute to more careful and attentive modes of knowing.

A Generative Sound Mural, The Whole Inside: Sounding the Body

The author discusses her approach in conceiving The Whole Inside, a generative sound mural combining artificial and human voices. Using nine Visaton speakers, Pure Data and data projection, the author confronts femininity and violent misogyny, by which the body is being depersonalized, leading to subsequent dissociation as a defense mechanism to cope with traumatic events. The work is based on a graphically violent text sourced from the incels.me (“involuntary celibates”) forum.