Doing anthropology in sound

A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropo-logical approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive inter-weavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology , we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2010

A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropo-logical approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive inter-weavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology , we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.

Encylopaedia entry for ‘Anthropology Beyond Text’ edited by R Cox, one of a 12 volume series in International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology New York: Wiley Blackwell Press, 2017.

2008

ABSTRACT This article argues that ethnomusicology would benefit from taking more account of the ways in which human beings experience and interpret sound. Ethnomusicologists have tended to work at a meta-discursive level (writing words about others’ words), leaving the gap between musical experience and paramusical discourse under-explored. This chapter asks whether that situation can be changed and what may be gained by doing so, and is illustrated with an example of north Indian raga performance.

This article is a reflection on the process of making a sonic-ethnography. I will contextualize this reflection within discussions on the use of sound recording equipment to construct ethnographies. I will propose the notion of 'sono-truth', an analogy taken from ethnographic film-maker Jean Rouch, as a means to articulate the peculiar effect of engaging with sound to do anthropology. I take sono-truth as the peculiar kind of truth that emerges in-sound. Sono-truth acknowledges the reciprocal relationship between the agency of the listener and sonic structures in the process of understanding the sonic dimension of a social experience.

Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world. (Sterne, 2012 p.2) Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality. Metaphors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life. Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor, infusing words with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations. (Novak and Sakakeeny, 2015 p. 1) In recent years there has been an explosion of work on, with or through sound by researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Highly interdisciplinary and often undertaken in cooperation with those outside academia, from musicians to professionals, the field of sound studies is increasingly diverse, daring and exciting. Using sonic frames to think through how technology mediates relations, how cultures of perception are learnt and changed, and how the growth and diversity of mass media informs communication can help us develop fresh approaches to longstanding questions, whatever our disciplinary home. This interdisciplinary and experimental course into the cultural, social, political and material dimensions of sound and listening will challenge students to both rethink their existing ideas and develop new interests. We will explore questions such as: What is ‘noise’ and why do states seek to regulate it? How does culture shape sound? How does architectural practice change as cities become nosier? What role does sound play in film? What is the relationship between music and social structure? How does technology mediate listening? What can listening more and reading less do to academic practice? How do people listen to religion? How can sound be seen? What else do we listen with apart from our ears? Taking sonic mediums seriously, the course includes practical sessions in which students will learn how to create audio materials relating to the topics and theories explored in class. Structure & Aim The aim of this course is two-fold: firstly to interrogate some of the key debates in sound studies, secondly to acquaint students with some of the different skills needed to undertake research through a sonic lens. Touching on some of the most important moments in the development of the field, as well as contemporary debates, 9 of the 12 sessions will be used to help students situate their thinking within a body of scholarship that is seemingly in a constant state of emergence. The remaining 3 sessions (taking place once every 4 weeks) will involve practical learning and hands on engagement within and outside the university. It will push students to experiment with different ways of listening and researching – from soundwalks to podcasting to transduction. Students will develop public facing materials in these sessions, which may be published if of sufficient quality. Learning Goals Students will: • have an understanding of the possibilities sound studies offers for research within and across disciplines • become acquainted with some of the key debates in the field • learn how to do field recordings • learn how to make a podcast • learn how to transduce images into sounds • experiment with applying theoretical and analytical insights in work across different sonic mediums Instructors Internal • Ian M. Cook ([email protected]) Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Data and Society Lead for 6 sessions along with course design & management Please contact Ian for all questions or concerns regarding the course and the other instructors for questions regarding their sessions. • Cameran Ashraf ([email protected]) Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy Teaching Class 10 ‘Orality, Literacy and Technology’ • Jeremy Braverman ([email protected]) Media and Visual Education Specialist & Visiting Professor Department of History Teaching Class 6 ‘Sound Design for Film’ and co-teaching Class 1 ‘Introductions’ • Dumitrita Holdis ([email protected]) Centre for Media, Data and Society Co-teaching Class 8 ‘Podcasting for Academics’ • Sara Svensson ([email protected]) Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies & Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy Teaching Class 3 ‘The Policies of Regulating Sound’ External • Judit Emese Konopás ([email protected]) Independent Sound Researcher Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’ • Zoltán Kovács ([email protected]) Interaction Designer, musician – Budapest Metropolitan University & Elefant Teaching Class 12 ‘Transduction and Sonification’ • Lucia Udvardyová ([email protected]) Journalist, Musician, Organizer/curator, DJ – Easterndaze/Baba Vanga/SHAPE Co-teaching Class 5 ‘Soundwalks / Phenomenological Music Listening’

Congregational music and verbal utterances are germane to the liturgical practices of World Christianity. However, despite this significance, methodologies that give primacy to the visual are often privileged. This essay argues for an emphasis on sound in the data collection process, recognizing that while both the visual and the aural are critical elements in the communication exchange, an emphasis on sound can reveal data unavailable elsewhere and uncover a cauldron of ambiguities, contradictions and contentions. Using a model of music discourse (Nattiez:1990) and data drawn from an ethnographic study within the context of a neo-Pentecostal African mega church in the United Kingdom, the function and character of congregational singing and the use of chanted confessions as a signifying practice are analysed. The findings reveal struggle and adaptation highlighting both resistance and assimilation in the sonic field. The essay concludes that paying attention to the sonic representations in congregations may prove to be a fruitful site of inquiry for scholars of World Christianity.

Resonance, 2020

We propose a sonic ethnography that focuses on listening, departing from an investigation of a soundscape to one that attends to how people listen. This, we suggest, is crucial for an anthropological approach that understands sound as processual and relational. Rather than describing what the ethnographer hears, we outline a project of listening with others. Listening is ordinary, something at which everyone is expert, even as it expands beyond the ear and beyond the human. In this way, listening is central to an anthropogenic sensorium that shifts away from human exceptionalism. Always emergent, listening—like climate change—is fundamentally uncertain. And while recording technology has long been central to an anthropology of sound, we invite new ways of engaging audio technology that take seriously its presence in everyday listening as well as its expressive capacities.

Commoning Ethnography, 2018

When considering an ethnography commons, it seems that there are at least two sorts of boundaries that commoning has the potential to reconfigure: 1) boundaries within the academy between disciplines and 2) boundaries between the academy and ‘the rest of the world.’ Admittedly, these boundaries are often constructed (or imagined) from within the academy itself, and seeking ways to re-draw them may result in yet another navel-gazing exercise that reaffirms particular modes of knowledge production disproportionally beneficial to those ‘in’ the academy. In this essay, I focus on ethnography grounded in sound and how it both productively traverses disciplinary boundaries and usefully brings into relief the unevenness of commoning. I examine a number of discourses in ethnomusicology dealing with sonic epistemologies and interaction, music making as ethnographic method, and intellectual property, all the while grappling with my own work as an ethnographer involved in the production of collaborative sonic texts.