Aurality

This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust.
Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance.
‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book—by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions.

The Gaṇeśa episode from the Mahābhārata, widely regarded as a late addition, narrates the mythical circumstances that led to the first written record of the poem: Vyāsa asks Gaṇeśa to write down the whole epic at his dictation. In the past, the episode was claimed to represent an attempt to promote the figure of Gaṇeśa, a god on the rise. Nevertheless, this explanation fails to account for the connection between the god and the act of writing an original work. A closer examination of the episode is therefore needed, with a view to reaching a more satisfactory interpretation. Our assumption is that the passage should be read as a realistic staging of the questions raised by the relationship between author, symbolised by Vyāsa, and scribe, symbolised by Gaṇeśa. In this context, the figure of Gaṇeśa serves to emphasize the relevance of the technology of writing and its professionals.

This multi-authored essay collects a range of position statements made by leading scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/opera, and sound design. Contributors independently prepared short statements in response to a central provocation—namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ and its implication for theatre sound studies. The essay provides snapshots of current opinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not advance a single, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/music and scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have been discussed in aesthetic theory. The essay ultimately reinforces the importance of attending to sound and scenography as co-constitutive elements, and suggests there is no single or best way of doing this.

By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City’s Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it. In doing this I invoke Angel Rama’s classic characterization of the ‘lettered’ city as a ‘sounded’ city and argue that this conceptualization may help us problematize how some of these forms of aurality are shaped, controlled, and circulated within older networks of national power. I also examine their potential to engage denationalized or post-national circulations of knowledge through sound that allow for the establishment of new networks of ‘cultured’ belonging and distinction beyond national borders.

In this article, Pieter Verstraete focuses on ‘auditory distress’ as a constitutive aspect of listening to the extent that it bears a new perspective on sound experiences in contemporary performance practice. As a departure point, he contends that sound is always distressing, however pleasurable the experience may be. He finds subsequent support for this claim in R. Murray Schafer’s Tuning of the World, and in Roland Barthes and Roland Havas’s chapter “Écoute”, which both appeared in 1977. Despite their different angles and objectives, both texts claim for an understanding of sound as spatially transgressing certain acoustic horizons, hearing thresholds and subjective boundaries, as the ear cannot be closed off at will. Therefore, we have produced psychological and cognitive mechanisms to deal with the continuous intervention of sound. In a rather throw-away remark in his book The Concept of Music (1990), Robin Maconie suggests in a similar vein that the activity of listening and hearing consists of keeping unwanted intensities at bay. Such drastic explanations of the workings of the ear made Hillel Schwartz to conclude in her chapter “The Indefensible Ear: A History” (2003) that the ear’s accumulative susceptibility and its lingering breakdown are the epitomes of our modern hearing culture. As such, our increasingly noisy soundscapes in the theatre and outside call for an awareness of our listening competences.

By bringing together such novel perspectives on sound and by contextualizing the historical validity of these claims, Verstraete maps out a conceptual framework to discuss the performative role of sound in relation to present-day cultures and politics of listening. He discusses the ramifications of this framework by means of a case study: The Wooster Group’s recent music drama interpretation of Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (2007-2009). In this performance, the musical spaces of Cavalli’s original dramma per musica are complemented by the sound-effects of blips and beeps and disembodied voices from Mario Bava’s science-fiction film Terrore Nello Spazio (aka Planet of the Vampires from 1965). The continuous juxtaposition of these two diegetic worlds and respective narratives creates a schizophonic perspective that urges the listener to create new connections, a new synthesis between the sounds, texts and images in an attempt to ‘perceive it all’: a global or evenly hovering attention. Yet the auditory distress constantly disrupts the evident mechanisms that would compensate the auditory distress. As such, the constant split in looking and listening (acousmatization) stresses the unframeability of sound and the necessity of the spectator to position oneself through her or his modes of listening, constantly shifting the attention. In this way, La Didone highlights the effects of auditory distress, causing awareness for the attitudes and regimes in listening that give salience, coherence, meaning and relative ‘closure’ to our fragmented experiences, ultimately filtered by our auditory imagination as the basis of these mechanisms. This awareness, in turn, gives rise to a mode of relating and positioning of the spectator as listening subject.

Hence, the proposed conceptual framework aims to offer a new perspective on the listener in contemporary theatre performances. In particular, it explains how the spectator as listener feels a desire to relate to sounds or music within the context of theatre’s hypermedial mechanisms, offering him occasional flashes of awareness about his responsibility as a listening subject. The spectator’s urge to respond to the auditory distress and the theatre’s promise to provide resolution in this desire precisely constitute the performative power of sound in the theatre. Ultimately, with the help of the case study, the conceptual framework aims to anchor the discussion of sound in contemporary (music) theatre within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality. Verstraete concludes with a proposal to relate the still ill-defined notion of aurality to an understanding of listening as a foremost discursive practice.

With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.

"In this paper, I develop a conceptual framework to look at audiences in post-migrant theatre productions that include music and the singing voice. I propose to extend the theory of aurality with a more historically and socially sensitive scope on the notion of community, which lays bare the cultural transactions and disjunctures that shape aurality today. The main aim of my current research is to pair sociological concepts with culturalist perspectives on identity issues
– which I term a ‘socio-aesthetic approach’ – to identify issues that would be later tested against policy analysis and in-depth interviews. At the centre of my inquiry, I critically reread Schafer’s pivotal notion of the ‘acoustic community’ in soundscape theory through other, philosophical notions of community, such as Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’, Agamben’s ‘the coming community’ and Blanchot’s ‘unavowable community’, among others. I aim to conceptualise how  mixed audiences are much-contested sites of tension between listening cultures shaping the individual against the hegemony of norms, tastes and prejudices that surround formative definitions of community."

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin's concept of aura should be understood as something that actively produces loss in the technological mediation of the past and the present. The production of loss occurs in the disjuncture between the past and the present when looking at one photograph through another in which the past is experienced in the present as a spark of contingency, the future in its anteriority as potential to be rediscovered. By following the trace of technical mediation inscribed in the images, we uncover the archival future of technological becoming of media objects in which one technology supplements, competes with, and overthrows another in the struggle for hegemony in the phantasmagoria of industrialized capitalism.

How do we hear?  Why do we listen?  From religious chant to village bells to elevator muzak to noise pollution, sound has played a major role in human cultures and human experience since time immemorial.  In this course, students will approach and engage critically with sound, listening, hearing, and aurality as categories of analysis.  In addition to weekly readings, students will be asked to write papers, partake in listening/sound exercises, and confect creative projects that engage with the themes of the class.

This article investigates the ontological significance of the voice, speech and listening within a theatrical context. Through an analysis of two performances; Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s ‘Giulio Cesare’ and Roger Bernat’s ‘Domini Públic’ it considers what might be in the voice that goes beyond language and that which is on the edge of understanding that might bring about alternative ‘ways of sensible being’ (Rancière 2009, p.10).

In this chapter, I discuss how theories of the disembodied voice call for a cultural understanding of our listening attitudes in music and musical theatre, which goes beyond genre restrictions. I contend that the enhanced interest in vocality on the postmodern stage, which lies at the basis of the newly emerging forms of music theatre since the 1950s (with an increase in the 1980s), has given rise to  a general re-‘enchantment’ of the disembodied voice, which re-enacts, challenges, substitutes communicative properties of orality, as much as it pushes and expands the discursive realm of aurality. Therefore, I wish to focus on the principle of acousmatization, which is most inherently part of our aural cultures and technologies, to the extent that this concept is useful to explain the effects of disembodied voices on the listener. Taking various examples of acousmatized voices in contemporary music and musical theatre, I will attempt to uncover the processes of how we perceive bodies in voices, particularly by means of our modes of listening.

Apresenta-se a noção de mapa sonoro mediante uma composição teórica que desloca o entendimento da prática cartográfica do âmbito da representação para o da operação. Subtraída às pretensões de representação, a prática de mapeamento sonoro pode ser pensada como elaboração de ferramentas tecnopolíticas para a atuação em contextos locais. Tal atuação pode facilitar processos de transculturação aural. Por transculturação aural me refiro a um processo de variação estrutural de sistemas de sentido e valor, experimentado de modo recíproco por duas culturas de escuta postas em contato. O foco do artigo é, portanto, o mapa sonoro como um artifício capaz de transformar padrões e condutas de escuta. A discussão envolve o conceito de sujeito entendido como efeito de práticas de habitação, bem como efeito da performance de ferramentas midiáticas. Neste contexto, apresento uma crítica a dois regimes majoritários de produção e compartilhamento de informação na internet mediante uso de tecnologias digitais, pensados aqui como regimes selfie e hater. Tais regimes são discutidos a partir de caracterizações etológicas da subjetividade, feitas à luz do conceito esquizoanalítico de ritornelo e do eco-epistemológico de ecognose. Apresenta-se, portanto, a categoria de mapa sonoro como um dispositivo tecnopolítico de intervenção crítica no fisiologismo dos regimes hegemônicos de auralidade, de modo a facilitar casos particulares de desterritorialização das práticas de escuta em relação a um regime contemporâneo de controle aural. A tese é a de que tal desterritorialização é condição necessária para um aprimoramento do senso de espaço público e do cuidado com espaços comuns.

[English]:

I present a notion of sound map through a theoretical framework that shifts the understanding of the cartographic practice from the scope of representation to that of the pragmatic operation. Subtracted from the pretensions of representation, the practice of sound mapping can conceived as an elaboration of technopolitical tools for acting in local contexts. Such action may facilitate aural transculturation processes. By aural transculturation I refer to a process of structural variation of meaning and value systems, experienced reciprocally by two listening cultures put in contact. The focus of the paper is, therefore, the sound map as an artifice capable of transforming listening patterns and behaviors. The discussion involves the concept of subject understood as the effect of dwelling practices, as well as the effect of the performance of media tools. In this context, I present a critique of two major regimes of production and sharing of information on the Internet through the use of digital technologies, thought here as the selfie and hater regimes. Such regimes are discussed on the basis of ethological characterizations of subjectivity, made in the light of the schizoanalytic concept of refrain and the eco-epistemological concept of ecognosis. Therefore, the category of sound map is presented as a technopolitical tool for critical intervention in the physiology of hegemonic regimes of aurality, in order to facilitate particular cases of deterritorialization of listening practices. The thesis is that such deterritorialization is a necessary condition for an improvement of the sense of public space and the care of common spaces.

Participation is the engine of cultural production. In the case of literature, the privileged modality that enables participation is auditory perception. In order to articulate a theory of literary cultural production based on auditory perception, participation needs to be analyzed in the context of Platonic methexis, understood as an embodied experience facilitated by brain mechanisms of sensory processing and cognition, which manifest in specific ways in written texts. The Siete Partidas, the first complete and systematic legal code of the Western World, provides the perfect case study to test a theory of literary cultural production based on methexis via auditory perception, because it is one of the first complete texts written in Castilian, making it ideal to illustrate the ways in which methexis affects the process of elaboration of a cultural product in a language that does not have a precedent in the form of an extensive body of texts, nor has it had time to develop a normalized system of grammar and rhetoric.

This essay assesses the interpretative consequence of the now wide and uncontrollable dissemination of an error, identifying three variants in an early poem by Sylvia Plath entitled "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (1957). The first of these variants is a sophistication introduced in the Pulitzer Prize-winning edition of her COLLECTED POEMS, which is used as the copy-text for most contemporary anthologies that include the poem. In order to isolate and characterize the additional variants, the two extant audio recordings of Plath reading the poem have been collated with the typescripts and printed versions. The essay asserts the textuality of the tape recordings in terms of a phenomenon the I call “aural sophistication,” concluding that the recorded voice is less valuable as an index of authority than as a witness of how subtle textual variations irrevocably affect interpretation. The effect of these three variants reveals a self-possession and resilience Plath rarely embodies in her poems, an uncharacteristic posture that manifests the poem’s relation to Emily Dickinson’s poetics of witness.

In the whole Comedy, but particularly in Inferno, Dante is constantly addressing our sense of hearing. Dante's first impressions of nearly every new circle or ring or character come through the ear. As he proceeds through Hell, he concludes that his eyes are not trustworthy, whereas his ears never let him down. Hell finally reveals itself as the kingdom of voices, of similes based on aural images and of Cantos where the ear functions as the driving force of human actions and relationships. This paper analyzes Inferno in terms of its aural nature and argues in favor of reading Dante's text aloud.

Programa de Educación Continua. Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM, México.

Dirigido a: científicos sociales, profesionistas que hayan concluido sus estudios de licenciatura, estudiantes de posgrado, investigadores y docentes, preferentemente con un proyecto afín en curso o por iniciar.

Duración: 120 horas distribuidas en 6 módulos, del 6 de febrero al 20 agosto del 2020, con tres semanas de vacaciones en julio.

Sesiones: los días jueves de 16 a 20 horas. Por única ocasión habrá dos sesiones en días consecutivos el jueves 20 y el viernes 21 de febrero. En el último módulo se contemplan 16 horas extramuros.

Cupo:15 mínimo y 30 máximo asistentes presenciales, y 10 participantes en línea

Informes: [email protected]

Existe una relación fuertemente arraigada en el imaginario colectivo, entre el fenómeno que conocemos como ruido y esa configuración sociocultural a la que llamamos ciudad. El presente trabajo sitúa el nacimiento de esta relación durante la Revolución Industrial, una época que se caracteriza por la convulsión de las estructuras económicas, políticas y culturales, y que también impacta el plano sensible del habitar urbano. En el presente trabajo daremos cuenta de la transformación que se opera en el paisaje sonoro de las ciudades industriales francesas, donde la movilidad poblacional, la densidad urbana, la maquinización y el ritmo de vida son los factores que están detrás del surgimiento del ruido como problema de contaminación ambiental y de salud pública, y de la transformación de la sensibilidad colectiva que deviene un nuevo modo de percepción sonora.

Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its means. 'Electronic' refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an 'end' of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, ends justified by means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. 1 We will move on from 'end(s)' to means, to media, and finally -as we shall see -to medium. 2 We understand that 'electronic' in 'electronic literature' -now indisputably one end of a field of serious play for the theory and practice of literature -refers metonymically to computation and all its infrastructure: hardware, software, interface & interaction design, networking, and today also, since at least the mid 2000s, to a particular de facto historically-created world built from all of this infrastructure within which most of us now 'live' for a considerable portion of our lives, our cultural and, predominantly, our commercially implicated, transactional lives.

This article approaches the sonic turn as a coherent set of methodological approaches across a variety of disciplines that begin with the publication of Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) and Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003), and provide an alternative to the Saussurean edict to ignore the semiotic qualities of material sound. These texts and those published in their wake proceed with an emphasis on the detail of sound as an isolated object of study, but also sound as a more general principle of selection beyond “music” or “speech”; a reorientation to denaturalize hearing and reconceive listening practices as historically contingent, material, and social techniques; the need for a media archaeology that links technology and technique without falling into “impact histories” or “media determinism.” While the sonic turn can be capacious, the polemical approach taken in this essay opposes an uncritical affective “vibrational ontology” and a poststructuralist understanding of sound as supplement. Instead, the essay highlights the importance of scholarship that situates Black, Latin American, and disability studies as central to research into how audile techniques bring together the material and the symbolic to hear how historical cultures have constructed ontologies by separating sound from language in order to create and sustain hierarchies of power between the human and the nonhuman, the abled and the disabled, the lettered and the listeners.

Music and sound can signify sexual desire and arouse sexual desire. Auditory stimulation can become a fetish, and “auralism” can be understood as a form of queerness. This chap­ter, based on participant-observer research in online kink communities, sketches an ac­count of auralism or auditory fetishism, rarely studied in comparison to other fetishes. The example of auralism shows the limitations of Freud’s vision-based account of fetishism as a disavowal of castration. While Freud believed that only men could be fetishists, attention to auralism shows that female fetishists are abundant (as do many other examples that contradict Freud’s claim). Recent musicological discussions of violence, pleasure, mastery, and control in music listening point toward further BDSM-linked aspects of auralism.

The diverse and highly stylized cries (pregones) of street vendors are a ubiquitous feature of the Mexico City soundscape and an audible manifestation of the city’s cultural heritage. Throughout its history, Mexico City’s historic center has functioned as a site of "informal" (i.e., unregulated) commerce. However, the economic crises of the 1980s, the gradual dismantling of social services, and the privatization of public spaces within Mexico City – including three ineffective bans on street vending in the city’s historic center within the last twenty-five years – have produced a paradox. While the number of street vendors rises as options for gainful employment dwindle, the criminalization of their means of subsistence has exposed these individuals to police bribes, confiscation, and harassment as well as criminal predation. Sound, in the form of street cries and amplified music, is essential to the maintenance of this tenuous way of life. Sound is used to alert potential clients to the wares, cost, and momentary location of a given vendor, to claim territory and drown out the cries of competitors, and to execute highly coordinated evasions of police raids. This paper provides a subject-driven analysis of the construction and functionality of sound within these contested territories and argues that a close ethnographic engagement with (inter-) subjective aural experiences of street vendors can demonstrate the integral relationship between aurality, identity, and resistance in contemporary Mexico City.

Con questa Collana di Quaderni di Ricerca Antropologico-Filosofico-Storico-Religiosa si vuole andare incontro alla sempre maggiore richiesta d'inJormazione sia da parte di studiosi e studenti sia da parte di un vasto pubblico di lettori interessati.

A música popular mesmo quando instrumental guarda uma relação estreita com a fala e os gestos da performance oral. Nos fonogramas feitos nas primeiras décadas do século XX são inúmeros os exemplos de gravações onde as marcas da oralidade se inscrevem ao ponto de se transformarem em motivos idiomaticamente instrumentais. Tomando como estudo de caso uma série de gravações feitas em torno do tema tradicional <Dança do Urubu>, gravado entre outros pelo Grupo do Louro, pela Banda da Casa Edison e por Baiano, que depois encontrou sua versão <autoral> na versão instrumental feita por Pixinguinha com os Oito Batutas, serão feitas algumas observações sobre a transposição de elementos contextuais, ligados à interpretação oral em elementos textuais, inscritos na tradição aural.

Taking The Wooster Group's To You, The Birdie! (Phedre) as a departure point, Pieter Verstraete investigates the performativity of sound in theatre in terms of its acousmatic potential to create an inner theatre. Through The Wooster Group's La Didone, he demonstrates how performativity of sound feeds from both an excess and a most compelling invitation in listening to respond through a plethora of listening modes. The Wooster Group's performances, however, incite for a global perception or 'evenly hovering attention' (Barthes' panic listening), which draws the listener's acoustic gaze to a point that potentially escapes the cogito, where new meanings could emerge.

Resumen En este texto se problematiza la noción de "silencio" y sus usos metafóricos para asistir la movilización de afectos entre los habitantes de Ciudad de México. El argumento toma como premisa que la escucha es una experiencia integral (corporal, cognitiva, y senso-afectiva) y una forma de "inscripción en la consciencia y la memoria" (Rivas, 2019; Gallagher, 2016). Seguidamente, se formulan diversas reflexiones al respecto de cómo momentos coyunturales en la historia reciente de Ciudad de México pueden estar moldeando las formas de escuchar, así como de percibir y significar el silencio entre los habitantes de la ciudad capital. Esta referencia a momentos coyunturales implica la consideración de instancias de traumas colectivos, sean estos por causas sociales o naturales, que acaban por ligarse a la memoria colectiva y la historia local de la Ciudad de México. En particular, se describen las reacciones socio-afectivas al terremoto que tuvo lugar en 2017; y su relación senso-perceptual con los seísmos del año 1985 y con dos trágicas masacres estudiantiles ocurridas en 1968 y más recientemente en 2014. Los eventos aludidos han sido de una magnitud afectiva tal que han requerido de un reacomodo sensorial para nombrar lo vivido y, sobre todo, para poder dar sentido a lo perdido, a lo ausente, a lo desaparecido. Estas formas de nombrar-o mejor dicho de no-nombrar-las ausencias, pero sí de performar el dolor que generan, permiten hablar de una reformulación de los significados en torno al referente "silencio". La propuesta consiste en explorar formas performáticas de la cultura, suponiendo que las modalidades de escucha e interpretación de la díada escucha/silencio en los distintos momentos históricos aludidos permiten conocer los usos afectivos del silencio, la performatividad de la escucha y la función de ambos en el procesamiento colectivo del trauma. Palabras clave estudios sonoros, escucha, acustemología, estudios sensoriales Sección especial: "Sentidos, emociones y artefactos: enfoques relacionales"

How might performance enable us to become attentive to the space sound produces? In this article, by acknowledging the shared environment created by aural relations, I focus on the potential of the performative space to immerse and fold the audience into a particular aural dynamism, investigating the impact and materiality of the sonorous on spectating bodies. The topic of sound and listening in theatre and performance studies has largely been confined to its role as a design element. There is, however, growing concern for the role of sound outside of its common confirmatory relation heralded by much-cited theatre scholars, such as Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte, who have begun to outline the importance of sound to theatrical endeavours. Here, I concentrate on the performances of Ivo Dimchev and Alma Söderberg to consider sound’s contribution as a material force and thereby examine how listening and aural attention might hold, alter, or shape the performative space.

We aim to experiment in this writing the potential of a certain idea of radical listening in the encounter with research-creation scenarios, which
we understand as the commitment to the creation of practices that put in the foreground how learning creates its own value. Radical listening, as the articulating principle of an ecology of practices, as we will see, seeks to care for the possible through what we have called an atmosphere of transauralities. This challenge of a radical pedagogy, in turn, happens as part of the indisciplinary project “Deep Blue” and as
a minor gesture and as an ethics of care in the framework of the propositions experienced at N’Me - Center for Art Research Methodologies Studies of the Art Institute of Arts of The State University of São Paulo (Unesp).

This paper is a contribution to an anthropology of aurality in Tamil Nādu. Using a sociolinguistic approach to performance, I shall argue that contemporary low caste performers in Tamil Nādu are part of a discursive tradition that dates back to Caṅkam times in order to show how this tradition, the dialogue between the art of writing and the practice of speech, is actually a feeling in Tamil that affects the concept of locality in Tamil. This feeling, or spoken Tamil, is a kind of aural competence. In performance, it is a way of speaking with writing in mind. In writing, it is that sentiment which demonstrates a kind of ethnographic authority. Caṅkam literature, Bhakti devotion, Tamil nationalism--indeed, the practice of spoken Tamil has been, and continues to be, a mode of organizing people in light of the state. Then and now, spoken Tamil has never been about how people really speak. Rather, it has always been a way of producing citizens by manufacturing aural competence.

This article presents a theoretical analysis of the concept of media space, which is understood as the result of the interaction between technological networks and the communication structure (producers, audiences, institutions, uses). This discussion is developed on the basis of a critical interpretation of Jurgen Habermas’ concept of liberal public sphere. Subsequently, the article discusses the formation of a plebeian aurality in Peru, the result of the technification of Indigenous music in the context of mass-migration. Taking as a case study the work of the writer and anthropologist Jose Maria Arguedas with said music, his intellectual practices are examined as a political intervention in the new media space, aimed at recomposing the nation&#39;s sound landscape.

Este artículo ofrece, en la primera parte, una reflexión teórica sobre el concepto de espacio mediático, el cual es entendido como resultado de la interacción entre la tecnología y la organización de la comunicación social (productores, públicos, instituciones, usos). Tal problemática se desarrolla desde una interpretación crítica del concepto de esfera pública liberal de Jürgen Habermas. En la segunda parte se analiza la formación de una auralidad plebeya en el Perú como resultado del proceso de tecnificación de la cultura musical indo-mestiza en el marco de las migraciones masivas. Tomando como caso el trabajo del escritor y antropólogo José María Arguedas con dicha música, se observan sus prácticas como un modo político de intervención en el nuevo espacio mediático, orientado a recomponer el paisaje sonoro de la nación.

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