To See With Your Ear

Ambiances in action / Ambiances en acte(s) - International Congress on Ambiances, Montreal 2012, Montreal : Canada (2012), 2012

Focused on different sound milieux in India, this paper examines public sites (residential areas, bus stations, Hindu temples, markets, etc.) as spaces for social interactions, cultivating different attention modalities and shaping specific social imaginaries. The ethnography is based on the study of ritual sound worlds (and public callings for praying), sonic tactics of merchants, techniques of distortion, sonic communication, and other manners to attribute to these sites a cultural identity as well as for users to share a community. Ambient sounds occupy several dimensions of daily life as well as political relationships. This paper is an introductory approach to the study of ambient sounds in their socio-cultural context of production and reception.

Oxford Art Journal, Volume 42, Issue 1, March 2019, Pages 91–111,, 2019

This paper by Vasanthi Dass is about Beam (2015) is a sound installation created by British sound artist Cathy Lane at the Artry Gallery, Kochi, India, which presents a confluence of sound from sea and harbour, creating succinct and minimalistic impressions. Sound waves, light waves, and waves from the Arabian Sea intersect – causing the viewer to speculate and reflect on the much-ignored space of the maritime world.

American Literary History, 2007

As recent literary, cultural, and historical studies take what might be called an “aural turn,” there has been a tendency to re-inscribe earlier assumptions about the relationship between the senses. In attempting to recuperate the apparently neglected sense of listening from the ocular-centrism of critical theory and of modern culture at large, a first phase of sound scholarship has characterized

Linguae &. Rivista di Lingue e Culture Moderne, 2020

Radical History Review, 2015

On early modern ships on the Atlantic Ocean, the sounds that the maritime lower classes produced with their tongues led the captains and officers to consider members of these classes as savage as the colonial others. The ar- gument presented here explores the ship as a world of sound and its lower classes' place within larger colonial soundscapes. This demonstrates how the sailor inhabited an ambivalent place between self and other. He lived within ships, which signified both the triumph of empire and potentially threatening aural spaces in themselves. The article then turns to English voyage narratives from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in order to show how sailors were conceived as making “noise.” Such descrip- tions worked anxiously toward silencing sailors by delineating what they had the ability to articulate on the basis of their social position. Hence, the sailor was thought by his superiors as unable to speak politically because such language was outside of what experience had taught him.

2017

This format explores the use of sound as part of a sensory ethnographic approach to urban waterfronts and elusive aquamobilities. How can listening promote auditory knowledge? Are sounds capable of generating new ethnographic insights? What presences, practices and spatio-temporalities do they reveal? Through a set ofsonic samples from my field recordings, I will describe and interrogate the acoustic features of post-industrial port cities environments. Sound is brought in as a productive tool in sensory ethnography, one which sparks new affective and relational understandings of place.

2018

2 A Google search using the key words "migrating sounds" results on a variety of articles and videos addressing the sounds that migrating birds make. One can "compare sounds of migrating geese" and read all about the behaviour of birds, but nothing is said of people as if human displacements are a silent march. It seems to me, though, that it must be a very noisy journey.

Qualitative Research Journal, 2019

In this special issue, we have sought to engage with researchers and documentary/arts practitioners using sound as a part of their inquiry into the social and beyond. We situate this issue within a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary work in sound studies, which has explored sonic possibilities in research and practice in sociology, history, anthropology, social geography, education, performance and cultural studies. The ephemeral nature of sound is part of what makes it special; its consumption is based on a temporal experience, a fleeting moment of comprehension that accumulates to create a greater understanding of the whole form (LaBelle, 2015). By focusing on the sonic qualities highlighted within these contributions, a layer of understanding is made possible that cannot be replicated in another form. To be clear, we are not saying that sound and phonographic methods (the use of recording and playback, see Gallagher and Prior, 2014) should be elevated above visual, textual and other sensory accounts, we want to continue to build on the argument that sound offers us a distinct way of understanding in terms of being and knowing (Sterne, 2012; Gershon, 2013; Feld and Brenneis, 2004). We agree with others (Pink, 2015; Bull and Back, 2016) who acknowledge the richness of sound as part of a multisensory shift in the methodological literature and also part of a turn toward the non-representational and performative. As a visceral and vibrational force, sound offers us considerations into that which falls between representational meaning, moving toward “how life is composed in the midst of affects” (Lorimer, 2008, p. 552). Aural approaches can articulate knowledge about places, spaces and the environments around us, conveying timbral information and frequency, but also the “immaterial, invisible, taken-for-granted atmospheres and emotional resonances” (Gallagher and Prior, 2014, p. 269). As LaBelle (2015) eloquently identifies what makes sound so extraordinary is its relationality, “it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating” (p. xi). As such, sound offers us something generative and emergent in the ontological and epistemological realms, holding the material and non-material in complexity through what Gallagher (2016) conceptualizes as “vibrational assemblages” (p. 43). In bringing this special issue together, we also sought to reflect the ideas of Gergen and Gergen’s (2011) about performative-oriented work that creates “truth zones” through creative, democratic and polyvocal knowledge pursuits. In crafting this special issue, we aimed to push back on hegemonic modes of knowledge production in the academy, which have often privileged written text as the sole channel through which we can collect, analyze represent and disseminate research. We also seek to contribute theory in relation to sound, rather than simply how sonic methods and techniques can be incorporated into qualitative research, following Back and Puwar’s (2012) call to mobilize sound and listening as a way to re-imagine modes of social research and develop social methods that are collaborative, imaginative and lively. Thus, we sought pieces that were generated from documentary studies and artistic-led practice, and those that are conceptualized as being anchored in qualitative methodology more broadly.

One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – as for instance text and sound – but between very different media aspects such as “sound” and “microphone” and “art”. On behalf of such an analysis the article claims that these art projects can be seen as an articulation of an auditory turn, in which sound no longer appears to be a transparent channel between us and the world, but rather a media conditioning that which is experienced.