Sound Stakes of the Atmosphere. Session 14 – Introduction

Cinema Journal, 2008

Nominating "sound studies" as a field of scholarship does several interesting, yet potentially controversial, things. It can imply a move toward fragmentation-breaking into established fields like music, film, and television study and positing yet another cultish research niche, taking away from a more integrated focus on sound as part of a medium-centered totality. Some have accused visual culture studies of doing this, of poaching on parts of barely established fields and rearticulating them to more accepted areas of study such as the visual arts and material culture, doing considerable violence along the way to the modes in which visual expression is actually produced and experienced. 1 Yet, as visual culture scholars have argued, such tactics can also draw parallels and establish continuities between disciplines separated more by historic accident than logical coherence, and reach out to embrace fields that might not have been even considered under the old paradigms. I believe sound studies holds much promise along these lines. If any one characteristic marks the field currently referred to as media studies-or cinema and media studies-it is the convergence of sound and screen, across institutions, venues, texts, forms, and reception situations. While most sound scholars would agree that the visual, screen-based aspects of contemporary media have received the bulk of academic and cultural attention, not even the most adamant visualist would argue that sound in all its aspects has not played an equally important, though less studied, role in media expression and production, even during the days of silent film. The essays in this section span a wide spectrum of sound-based work, though they do not encompass all the approaches that can be brought to the study of sound in cultural expression and everyday life. For instance, a vibrant field has grown up around the study of "soundscapes," or acoustic ecology, in the past twenty years,

The Global South, 2022

Iluminace, 2021

Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Second Edition, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

Qualitative Research Journal, 2019

What is our sense of sound? It is important to realise that sound is a physical change in the environment (change in air pressure) that stimulates a cascade of processes in the ear. It is still a mystery how humans have evolved to adapt a sense of sound and be able to hear a large range of sounds, from 20 Hz to 20kHz (20'000Hz). Even on this world, organisms from the Chiroptera family (bats) have the ability to hear higher frequencies (ultrasonic) in relation to Homo sapiens. Elephants also use infrasonic wavelengths to communicate to their herd across large distances. But in order to be able to communicate with another organism, for example; a teacher in a class room or the man at the till, there must be a way of receiving that information of changing air pressure due to the vibrations caused by muscular contractions of muscle fibres in the larynx. Primarily, exploring the journey sound goes through is complicated enough! The source of sound will come from changes to an object that cause the molecules to vibrate, transferring some of that kinetic energy across to the air molecules it surrounds where elastic collisions from the compressions and rarefactions of the air travels until the energy is absorbed by objects around you or has spread out so far that it becomes inaudible to the human ear at last. However, organisms, such as us, can perceive sound. Some sounds interfere beautifully to make hit singles or classical concerto's and some sounds produced by a novice on the violin are not so pleasing. The stimulus of sound triggers sensory neurones that send action potentials (electrical charges) to our temporal lobe positioned in a bilateral placement, aligned with our ears. In order to understand the nature, mechanics and perception, it is important to use the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics to gain an understanding of the human ear and how it detects sound.

2019

RE:SOUND is part of the Media Art Histories conference series, which has brought together leading researchers, artists, and scientists on a series of interdisciplinary topics for over 14 years. This edition of Media Art Histories, under the name RE:SOUND 2019, focused on sound and the sonic domain as intrinsic dimensions in the development of art and media technologies. Although sonic experiments and sound expressions abound in the histories of art, the occurrence of sound in art and media remains heavily undertheorized and decontextualized. RE:SOUND aimed at filling this gap in understanding sound by addressing the technoresonance, trans-mediality, and cultural and social reverberation of media art, art exhibitions, and archives. RE:SOUND 2019 featured keynotes by renowned scholars and artists, including Jamie Allen, Samson Young, Salomé Voegelin, Marie Højlund, and Christoph Cox. Additionally, a special panel with curators presented a conversation on topics related to exhibiting sound and included contributions by Barbara London, Arnau Horta, Voegelin, and Morten Søndergaard. The conference was divided into nine tracks that explored different aspects of sound and its relationship to art, institutions, philosophies, politics, and power.

in Spatial Senses Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, 1st Edition Edited by Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy, Charles Spence. New York: Routledge, 2019