Friday 13 November | 10:00 - 16:30 | Online Event
Auraldiversities
A year-long programme addressing the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in Arts and Humanities research and theory, questioning how and what we hear, what we listen to and why, as situated within our contemporary milieu: that of ecological, existential, social, economic and epidemiological crises.
Entwined with sonically sensile organisms, sessions extend well beyond human worlds into speculative acoustic realms of future listening.
Sessions are virtual with some materials sent in advance. SIGN UP to be sent a session link and password.
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Listening in the Present Tense
A focus on the particular moment of listening now, inside a pandemic. What do we hear and why do we listen? What are we listening for and what might we be missing? Can we listen with collective ears - together apart? How is listening useful - early warning system, or diagnostic tool?
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Session One
Kate Carr | Pandemic sounds: then and now
In this workshop Kate will re-present works from spring 2020, when she taught a series of online workshops, which focused on field recording and soundscape composition as a way of approaching and coping with the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. At this time, Kate also curated, Interiorities, a series of radio shows, which featured contributions of compositions using sound to examine, escape from, or re-configure the pandemic.
Kate will present this material as a way of examining what, if anything, has changed, about listening, sound and our compositional processes as the pandemic has slowly settled into the 'new normal'. This workshop will take the form of a discussion and listening session.
Kate Carr's work is focused on the links between sound, place and affect, and she works across composition, performance and installation. She is particularly interested in sound as a way of approaching broader processes of spatial constitution and contestation. Carr runs the sound art label Flaming Pines. www.gleamingsilverribbon.com
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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay | Hyper-listening: praxis
Hyper-listening: praxis is a series of collective actions that operates as a set of exercises and conceptually triggered experiments involving the methodology of meditative listening that intends to explore the transcendental aspect of everyday sound and engaged learning about the self and its environment through a production of subjectivity. These actions help to locate multitude of associative thoughts, mindful ephemera, imaginations and memories emerging as a response to being in an immersive environment of contemporary urban life. These sonic thought-streams are guided as fertile auditory associations to engage independently, inclusively and contemplatively with the self and the personal environment. This on-going series of actions has been conducted in various arts, humanities and cultural institutions across Europe and Asia in workshop and other scholarly formats to mobilize and nurture an awareness of social inclusion and contemplative acceptance of the others in the context of today’s turbulent times.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an Indian-born media artist, composer, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race, and decolonization. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay is the author of The Nomadic Listener (2020); his writings on various issues around sound and listening regularly appear in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and other publications internationally. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in new media from Aarhus University; he has recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship. www.budhaditya.org
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Noé Cuéllar | Beat Mesmerism Hollow
Our current moment of collective restriction has led to a surge of online outreach in art communities, whose screen-bound artworks compete for human attention against pressing world affairs. There is no shortage of things to listen to, to view, to process – but there is a shortage of time, and of investment of attention to experience the depths of surfaces.
The corporate structures that accelerate digital economies surveil and peer into its users. By the same token, vast and non-transferrable realms of experience evade technological capture and reduction: the depths of unknown spheres. In 2018 a unit of time called a “flick” was designated by Facebook and Oculus to quantify the average time someone looks at a social media post. A flick is equivalent to one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second. Is a flick a modern pop song? What is the shortest instant in which music can occur? Is the duration of music limited by its acoustic verberation? What kind of music do we have time for nowadays?
Rather than a score for acoustic execution, Nestor’s Beat Mesmerism Hollow is an induction for phonomnesis–the mental experience of sound, such as memories of speech or thoughts of music. By reading the score’s text, the listener’s imagination is to render its sounds willfully into music – unbounded by sensory, acoustic, or temporal limitations. Participants are invited to share their experience as a group, to piece together a scenario for this experimental music from each inner listening perspective.
In phonomnetical and acoustic listening alike, subjectivity is both a slice and a whole in relation to the vast dimensions in which we find ourselves, and which we share. Beat Mesmerism Hollow points to creative will, unquantifiability, and the impressions that the thought of music cast upon the mind – which can make anything sound.
Artist/composer Noé Cuéllar is founder of Future Vessel, a repository for unclassifiable documents to listen to, view, and hold, including works by Coppice [research consortium for experimental music] since 2009, and Nestor since 2018. He has performed and presented sound installations for numerous venues in Chicago including the Pritzker Pavilion, The Arts Club, Cultural Center, Goethe-Institut, University of Chicago, and Kavi Gupta; received commissions for new work from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Experimental Sound Studio in partnership with the Chicago Park District, Chicago Film Archives. He has been artist-in-residence in various institutions internationally, and published music on artist-run labels including Another Timbre (UK), Aposiopèse (FR), Entr’acte (BE), Notice Recordings (US), and Senufo Editions (IT). www.futurevessel.com
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Session Contact/Queries:
Helen Frosi | SoundFjord
With thanks to:
Those facilitating, leading, and chairing sessions.
Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex.
Curated by: John Drever, Alice Eldridge, and Helen Frosi.
All activities are supported with CHASE cohort development funding.
Auraldiversities continues with Session 2