© Becoming Generic: This is an AI-generated image prompted by a conversation about the script and abstract for the accompanying audio essay.
Peer-reviewed audio paper

Noisy Interference in the Becoming-Generic of Sonic Alerts

Af
9. november 2024
Fokus: GENERIC SOUNDS
  DOI https://doi.org/10.48233/07

Abstract

Consider how provocations such as »If you see something, say something« sonic signage in Toronto subway stations might evoke patterns of social scripts. Similarly, contemplate how wildfire alerts resounding after landing at a city airport could trigger feelings of heightened unease. This essay asks how the generic, as a non-specific aggregate, might ordain sonic signals into forms of social management. More specifically, it contemplates how a becoming-generic of sounds might prime bodies into heightened states. Yet, sounds meant for aligning bodies in certain ways contrast the messiness of the noise of everyday life instantiated through spontaneous social interactions. This leads us to question how everyday social noise might act against becoming-generic messaging. This sonic essay draws attention to the possible becoming-generic of sounds like emergency alerts as an increasing presence in charged neoliberal spaces. It additionally explores sites of noise as interference generated through social bodies that have the potential to interrupt sonic alerts. Through spoken cases of varying sorts, including samples of alerts and field recordings captured in the Americas, we consider how human activity as a possible vehicle of interference serves as a resistance agent against the speculated becoming-generic of alert sounds in public and private spaces. 

Sound braid (Luisa Isidro Herrera, Nicole Marchesseau, Johann Sander Puustusmaa, Pablo D. Herrera Veitia) is an exploration of collaborative listening and sonic conversations, a convergence of events that hop on and off the web platform with the hopes of sparking discussion, remixing, and moving through and with bodies in various ways. Sound braid is a non-institutionally sanctioned space and side-project meant for collaboration, inhabitation, and disruption. A mutable platform subject to change and revision, the sound braid website invites sounds that move, simmer, or ignite discussions. It aims to engage with experimental forms and to create rather than reproduce, to shape ecologies rather than libraries. This site may include or prompt non-performed or unexceptional sounds, dedramatized silences, quotidian dins, or failures. 

 

Image: © Becoming Generic: This is an AI-generated image prompted by a conversation about the script and abstract for the accompanying audio essay.

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