Sounding Out!

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: The New Brunswick Music Scene Symposium

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Join Frank Bridges and Christine Lutz–founders of the New Brunswick Music Scene Archive, at Rutgers University–as they converse with a panel of seasoned veterans from the New Jersey music scene. Included on the panel are Ronen Kauffman, author of New Brunswick, NJ Goodbye; Marissa Paternoster, singer and guitarist of The Screaming Females; Joe Steinhardt, co-founder of Don Giovanni Records; and Jim Testa, the editor of Jersey Beat.The discussion becomes intimate very quickly as the audience converses intently with the panelists. Together the group compares inter-generational notes about what makes a music scene and the affordances of situating a counter-culture archive in a university setting.

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Featured Image: Excerpt from the cover of Jersey Beat #14. Image used with permission by the author.

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Frank Bridges is a Doctoral Candidate at The Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. He is also a part-time lecturer, musician, and graphic designer. His research interests are the DIY and Internet-based production and distribution of music, and visual communication with a focus on semiotic analysis and street art.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Podcast #37: The Edison Soundwalk–Frank Bridges

This is What it Sounds Like……..On Prince and Interpretive Freedom–Benjamin Tausig

Soundwalking New Brunswick, NJ and Davis, CA–Aaron Trammell

Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

Each of the essays in this month’s “Medieval Sound” forum focuses on sound as it, according to Steve Goodman’s essay “The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” in The Sound Studies Reader, “comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body (70).  These investigations into medieval sound lend themselves to a variety of presentation methods loosening up the “petrified body” of academic presentation. Each essay challenges concepts of how to hear the Middle Ages and how the sounds of the Middle Ages continue to echo in our own soundscapes.

The posts and podcast in this series begins an ongoing conversation about medieval sound in Sounding Out!. Our opening gambit in April 2016, “Multimodality and Lyric Sound,” reframes how we consider the lyric from England to Spain, from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, pushing ideas of openness, flexibility, and productive creativity. We will post several follow-ups throughout the rest of 2016 focusing on “Remediating Medieval Sound.”  And, HEAR YE!, in April 2017, look for a second series on Aural Ecologies of noise! –Guest Editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman

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Medieval charms run the gamut from offering protection for journeys (travel was often perilous) to warding your cattle from thieves (the runic letter for ‘cattle’ also means ‘wealth’) to various kinds of healing for people, animals and even the earth. Many of them include verses that are meant to be sung.

What is the sound of magic? How do you sing it properly without notation? Does it affect the efficacy of the charm if you sing it wrong?

‘Sing ðis gealdor’ Sing this charm the Anglo-Saxon texts command. The words are even linked as ‘galdorsangas’ incantations, but the doom-and-gloom 11th century preacher Archbishop Wulfstan uses that term in the pejorative sense of things to avoid, lumping it together with ‘sorceries’ as things to avoid. In its time the right way of singing was understood but, as is the case about much of the social context, we have lost the specifics.

How to recreate an Anglo-Saxon charm in a modern sound file then? If you’re going to do it right, how do you capture the magic in a way that’s true to the source material and yet accessible to a modern audience (even if it’s just my students)? I was determined to do it and do it right.

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K. A. Laity is the author of the novels White Rabbit, Knight of the White Hart, A Cut-Throat Business, Lush Situation, Owl Stretching, Pelzmantel, The Mangrove Legacy, Chastity Flame and the collections Unquiet Dreams and Unikirja, as well as editor of Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and Drag Noir, writer of other stories, plays and essays. Her stories tend to slip across genres and categories, but all display intelligence and humour. Myths and fairy tales influence much of her writing. The short stories in Dreambook [originally Unikirja] found their inspiration from The Kalevala, Kanteletar, and other Finnish myths and legends: the stories won the 2005 Eureka Short Story Fellowship and a 2006 Finlandia Foundation grant.

Dr. Laity teaches medieval literature, film, digital humanities and popular culture at the College of Saint Rose, though she was at NUI Galway as a Fulbright scholar for the 2011-2 academic year.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

‘A Clateryng of Knokkes’: Multimodality and Performativity in “The Blacksmith’s Lament”–Katherine Jager

Mouthing the Passion: Richard Rolle’s Soundscapes–Christopher Roman

EPISODE LI: Creating New Words from Old Sounds–Marcella Ernest, Candace Gala, Leslie Harper, and Daryn McKenny

Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”

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Cecilia Suhr’s sound art piece, From Ancient Soul to Ether, reflects on how sound can describe beings from the past, present and future in simultaneous coexistence. From the vibrational level of the earth to the futuristic murmurs of aliens and robots, from the sound of blossoming plants to that of technological advancement, this recording captures the timeless and paradoxical interweaving of contradictory sounds. For instance: harmony vs. disharmony, past vs. future, human vs. machine, time vs. timelessness. In juxtaposing these contradictions, From Ancient Soul to Ether captures the sound of all things in harmony. The sounds of multiple dimensions and eras blend and dissolve together, creating one cohesive sound in an attempt to represent being without judgement, being without discrimination, and being amongst the ideology and difference of all things. Here Suhr expresses how the energy fields from all dimensions evokes not just the here and now, but also eternity.

Note:  The violin in this recording is specifically tuned to 432 HZ as opposed 440 HZ. I was first introduced to 432 HZ tuning by Simone Vitale, a voice yoga teacher, sound healer, and musician based in Germany. 432 HZ is a specific tuning method that seeks alignment with the universal frequencies and harmonies.

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Featured Image: “crop circle Windmill Hill – fusion” by Ian Burt @Flickr CC BY.

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H. Cecilia Suhr (www.ceciliasuhr.com) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University-Hamilton and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Art at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.  Starting from August 2016, She will be an Associate Professor in a new department called Humanities and Creative Arts at Miami University Hamilton while maintaining her current ties at Oxford campus.  She is also a three-time award-winning interdisciplinary and multimedia artist whose work spans paintings, digital art, video art, sonic art, and music. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Cincinnati/West Chester, OH, Fort Thomas/NewPort Kentucky, Laurel, Maryland, and internationally in cities such as Moscow, London, Seoul and Tokyo. It has been publicly collected by the Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum in Moscow, NamSeoul University, Sisters of St. Paul of Charities, and KT Korea.  She is the author of two academic books–Social Media and Music: The Digital Field of Cultural Production (Peter Lang Press, 2012) and Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities (MIT Press, 2014)–and an editor and contributing author of Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts (Routledge Press, 2014). In 2012, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Research Award for Digital Media and Learning.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Podcast #34: Sonia Li’s “Whale”–Sonia Li

SO! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul–Brooke A. Carlson

SO! Podcast #10: Interview with Theremin Master Eric Ross–Aaron Trammell

Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Listening to the New England Soundscape Project

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TRANSCRIPT:

This week’s podcast is a continuation of this Monday’s article “Reflective Sound Gathering via the New England Soundscape Project.” Here Daniel Walzer shows how his work in gathering sounds from different New England areas encouraged him to understand the world less through his eyes and more through his ears. As Walzer travels around from Connecticut to Massachusetts to Rhode Island, he prompts us to consider the impact of everyday sounds on our day-to-day behavior. How does attuning oneself to the sounds in the environment lead to meditative and embodied reflection?

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Featured Image: Merrimack River. Used with permission by the author.

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Acknowledgements

An Internal Seed Grant from the University of Massachusetts Lowell supports the New England Soundscape Project. 

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Daniel A. Walzer is an Assistant Professor of Composition for New Media at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  Walzer’s research and reviews appear in theLeonardo Music Journal, the Journal of Music, Technology & Education, the Journal of Radio & Audio Media and forthcoming articles in TOPICS for Music Education Praxis, and the Music Educators Journal.  Walzer received his MFA in Music Production and Sound Design for Visual Media from Academy of Art University, his MM in Jazz Studies from the University of Cincinnati and his BM in Jazz Studies from Bowling Green State University.  Walzer is currently pursuing doctoral studies in education at the University of the Cumberlands. Read more at http://www.danielwalzer.com

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Reflective Sound Gathering via the New England Soundscape Project–Daniel A. Walzer

SO! Podcast #43: Retail Soundscapes and the Ambience of Commerce–James Hodges

SO! Amplifies: #hearmyhome and the Soundscapes of the Everyday–Cassie J. Bownell and Jon M. Wargo

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Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Creating New Words from Old Sounds

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This podcast looks at how ancestral languages are spoken in today’s changing environment of technology and popular culture. Here, Marcella Ernest leads a discussion considering how Indigenous people are adapting heritage languages to modern times. With an open mind and creative methodologies, Native language communities, activists, scholars, and educators are working to integrate and inspire our heritage languages to continue into the 21st century and beyond. Finding new words with old sounds is intended as a means of both preserving language and helping people to learn it. How do heritage languages change to accommodate new things like computers, cell phones, and popular culture? Can ancestral sounds be translated to create new words?

Guests: 

Candace Gala, PhD (Hawaiian) The University of British Columbia, Language and Literacy Education

Leslie Harper (Ojibwe) Director, National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs (NCNALSP)

Daryn McKenny, (Gamilaraay – Aboriginal Australian) Miromaa Aboriginal Language & Technology Centre

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Marcella Ernest is a Native American (Ojibwe) interdisciplinary video artist and scholar. Her work combines electronic media with sound design with film and photography in a variety of formats; using multi-media installations incorporating large-scale projections and experimental film aesthetics. Currently living in California, Marcella is completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Drawing upon a Critical Indigenous Studies framework to explore how “Indianness” and Indigenity are represented in studies of American and Indigenous visual and popular culture, her primary research is an engagement with contemporary Native art to understand how members of colonized groups use a re-mix of experimental video and sound design as a means for cultural and political expressions of resistance.

www.marcellakwe.com

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Featured image is used with permission by the author.

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Sounding Out! Podcast #24: The Raitt Street Chronicles: A Survivor’s History – Sharon Sekhon and Manuel “Manny” Escamilla

Sounding Out! Podcast #47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah — Marcella Ernest

Sounding Out! Podcast #40: Linguicide, Indigenous Community, and the Search for Lost Sounds – Marcella Ernest

Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Yoshiwara Soundwalk: Taking the Underground to the Floating World

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Join Gretchen Jude as she performs a soundwalk of the Yoshiwara district in Tokyo. Throughout this soundwalk, Jude offers her thoughts on the history, materiality, and culture of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red-light district. An itinerary is provided below for the curious, as well as a translation of the Ume wa saiti ka, intended to help orient listeners to the history of the Yoshiwara. What stories do the sounds of this district help to tell and can they help us to navigate its sordid history?

Itinerary:

From the outer regions of the capital’s northwestern surburban sprawl to Ikebukuro Station (Tobu Tojo Line), transferring from Ikebukuro to Iidabashi (Yurakucho Line), from Iidabashi to Ueno-okachimachi (Oedo Line), from Naka-okachimachi to Minowa (Hibiya Line), then by foot from Minowa to Asakusa:

Due east, past Tōsen Elementary School

South on a nameless narrow lane parallel to Edomachi Street, with a short stop at Yoshiwara Park

Turning from Edomachi Street west onto Nakanomachi Street

Curving around to the south, just past the Kuritsu-taito Hospital and Senzoku Nursery School, with a long stop at Benzaiten Yoshiwara Shrine

Due south toward the throngs of tourists at the Sensō-ji Temple grounds, then across the Sumida River to my hauta teacher’s studio in a quiet residential neighborhood south of the Tokyo Sky Tree

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Gretchen Jude is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California Davis and a performing artist/composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her doctoral research explores the intersections of voice and electronics in transcultural performance contexts, delving into such topics as presence and embodiment in computer music, language and cultural difference in vocal genres, and collaborative electroacoustic improvisation. Interaction with her immediate environment forms the core of Gretchen’s musical practice. Gretchen has been studying Japanese music since 2001 and holds multiple certifications in koto performance from the Sawai Koto Institute in Tokyo, as well as an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in Oakland, California. In the spring of 2015, a generous grant from the Pacific Rim Research Program supported Gretchen’s intensive study of hauta and jiuta singing styles in Tokyo. This podcast (as well as a chapter of her dissertation) are direct results of that support. Infinite thanks also to the gracious and generous assistance of Shibahime-sensei, Mako-chan and my many other friends and teachers in Japan.

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All images used with permission by the author.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Park Sounds: A Kansas City Soundwalk for Fall – Liana M. Silva

Sounding Out! Podcast #46: Ruptures in the Soundscape of Disneyland – Cynthia Wang

Sounding Out! Podcast #37: The Edison Soundwalk – Frank Bridges

Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/nnrag-yeh75

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Sound and Sexuality in Video Games

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This week’s podcast questions how identity is coded into the battle cries shouted by characters in video games. By exploring the tools that sound studies provides to understand the various dynamics of identity, this podcast aims to provoke a conversation about how identity is encoded within the design of games. The all too invisible intersection between sound, identity, and code reveals the ways that sound can help explain the interior logic of the games and other digital systems. Here, Milena Droumeva and Aaron Trammell discuss how femininity and sexuality have been coded within game sounds and consider the degree to which these repetitive and objectifying tropes can be resisted by players and designers alike.

Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures. She has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments. Milena is a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking enthusiast, published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology. You can find her musings on sound and other material goodies at http://natuaural.com.

Aaron Trammell is a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar for Faculty Diversity in Informatics and Digital Knowledge at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He earned his doctorate from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015. Aaron’s research is focused on revealing historical connections between games, play, and the United States military-industrial complex. He is interested in how military ideologies become integrated into game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out!

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Featured image borrowed from Geralt @Pixabay CC BY.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Sounding Out! Podcast #29: Game Audio Notes I: Growing Sounds for Sim Cell – Leonard J. Paul

Sounding Out! Podcast #45: Immersion and Synesthesia in Role-Playing Games — Nick Mizer

Video Gaming and the Sonic Feedback of Surveillance – Aaron Trammell

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Sounding Out! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://soundstudiesblog.com/