It is through knowledge of the art-form and skilful weaving of networks of symbols, that creatives can dictate the terms of storytelling and thus exert their power over the audience. To be able to engage in the experience of a film, the audience needs to suspend their disbelief and put themselves at the mercy of the film-making team. 

When thinking of power in the context of sound, one of the first elements that comes to mind is loudness. But mere use of loudness to exert authority over the audience's emotions puts the mechanisms of hegemony under the spotlight. Upon closer analysis it becomes apparent that the 'loud' cannot exist without the 'quiet'. So does this also mean that power can be exercised by wielding silence? In film, as well as in real life, those who command silence can exercise power in subtle, more refined and inconspicuous ways.

These landmarks of power struggles in sonic narratives are defined by saliency and it is contrast that gives rise to power: the greater the opposition, the greater the power. The key thus, is not loudness or silence but dynamic range; the scale and contrasts of levels that occur throughout a creative sound piece.

Audio-paper playback note: Due to the themes & content of the piece, some of the sounds can potentially feel suddenly loud (depending on the listener's playback volume). The overall loudness of the pieces is -28 LKFS, with a True Peak value -2.8dBFS.

The fear of having to take a completely unimportant, yes, pointless, job in order to pay the rent has always been deep within me. I've always had great compassion for the people who were forced to do that.

A job in a call center stands out to me as one of the worst things I could ever imagine: a job where I was tasked with disturbing randomly selected people at work or at home to ask them to answer questions that I knew would have very little effect or benefit. I have too much respect for other people's time and chores to ever bring myself to do that. Fortunately, it has never been necessary for me to take a job in any call center.

Such jobs have existed throughout most of the late modern era in much of the world. They are partly covered by the term pseudo work, which the anthropologist Dennis Nørmark and the philosopher Anders Fogh Jensen launched in their joint debate book of the same title from 2018. The term denotes all the work that basically makes no difference, but still exists because measurability, management paradigms and evaluation culture have come so prevalent in the same era.

Jobs of this type – and several others with them – have been labeled with the unforgettable term McJob, as it happened in the American author Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X from 1991. The term denotes the optimally boring and perspective-less jobs, which are unskilled and thus poorly paid, and which have no potential whatsoever from a career perspective

Frygten for at være nødt til at tage et fuldkommen ligegyldigt, ja, meningsløst, job for at kunne betale huslejen har altid siddet dybt i mig. Og jeg har altid haft stor medfølelse med de mennesker, der var tvunget til det.

Et job i et callcenter står for mig som noget af det værste, jeg overhovedet kunne forestille mig: Et job, hvor jeg i så fald havde til opgave at forstyrre tilfældigt udvalgte mennesker på arbejde eller derhjemme for at bede dem svare på spørgsmål, jeg dybest set vidste ville have en meget lille effekt. Jeg har for megen respekt for andre menneskers tid og gøremål til nogensinde at kunne få mig selv til det. Og heldigvis har det aldrig været nødvendigt for mig at skulle tage et job i noget som helst callcenter.

Sådanne jobs har eksisteret gennem det meste af den senmoderne epoke i store dele af verden. De er til dels omfattet af begrebet pseudoarbejde, som antropologen Dennis Nørmark og filosoffen Anders Fogh Jensen lancerede i deres fælles debatbog med samme titel fra 2018. Begrebet betegner alt det arbejde, som dybest set ikke gør nogen forskel, men alligevel findes, fordi målbarhed, styringsparadigmer og evalueringskultur er kommet til at fylde så meget i selvsamme epoke.

Jobs af denne type – og flere andre med dem – er blevet betegnet med det uforglemmelige begreb McJob, sådan som det skete i den amerikanske forfatter Douglas Couplands roman Generation X fra 1991. Begrebet betegner de optimalt kedelige og perspektivløse jobs, som er ufaglærte og dermed dårligt lønnede, og som ikke har noget som helst potentiale set i et karriereperspektiv.

»Jeg mener, at vi lige nu befinder os i en tid præget af ‘emotional hacking’ og manipulation! Vi er grundlæggende utroligt bange for at blive følelsesmæssigt manipuleret og meget skeptiske, hvis vi mistænker nogle for at ville bruge fx teknologiske værktøjer til det. Når et fænomen som ASMR er så interessant i den sammenhæng, er det fordi, det er baseret på helt bestemte teknikker, der skal trigge og påvirke vores følelser meget direkte.« 

Sådan sagde den canadiske komponist, medie- og performancekunster Erin Gee, da Seismograf mødte hende i efteråret til en samtale om hendes arbejde i et multimodalt domæne, hvor menneskelig fysiologi og følelser møder algoritmer og digitale systemer. Udgangspunktet var egentlig en diskussion af, hvad AI og automatisering betyder for musik- og lydproduktion, men kom i lige så høj grad til at handle om, hvad der er gået forud for og har informeret den aktuelle udvikling. 

The essay probes poetics and the politics of a life-affirming operation in which Ukrainians have been self-engaged to resist subjugation and assimilation under Russian colonialism. It leads through the scene of historical and idiosyncratic experiences to ask how speech and action create conditions for life to be where it has been pressed into non-being in the process of cultural genocide. Ukrainian inter-lingual Surzhyk-poised journey through forced russification is taken as a path to tracing the iterations of resisting life that crafts itself in the surzhykness of its affirmative gestures. I write to reassess the poetics of relation between the oppressor and the oppressed toward expressions of fugitivity and fabulation, and a posture of being in a mode of self-defense that keeps one from perishing. It is my argument that Ukrainian protocol for collective survival – one on sonic terms, is a form of commitment that obliges to Ukrainian life through mouth-on doings that engage the insurgent collectivity of shared speech. 

The text is centered by the argument in a more affording way. It gathers from past and present politics, and repertoire of experiences to rethink the Ukrainian subject across the register of violent subjection

Årslister er en illusion, det siger sig selv. Som fuldtidskritiker hørte jeg i 2023 mere musik end de fleste, et par tusind album, velsagtens, og det er selvfølgelig rigtig flot, Sune. Det syntes Spotify Wrapped i hvert fald og roste mig for at ligge i top-én-procent af alle verdens mest miserable lyttejunkier.

Men selv heroppe på toppen af bjerget, hvor folk går rundt med rander under øjnene og gror fast til deres ørebøffer, er reel oplysning et fatamorgana. Hvad jeg hørte i 2023, svarer til, hvad der blev uploadet til Spotify i løbet af en enkelt formiddag.

Så forstår man jo godt, at tidens mest populære bogprojekt, Solvej Balles septologi Om udregning af rumfang, er en meditation over at være fanget i den samme novemberdag år efter år. Endelig tid til at indhente det tabte. Oh, lykke.

Måske er det tidens utilstrækkelighed, der i år fik mig til at sætte pris på de album, der formåede at bygge en egen, hel verden op. Det bedste af dem, Bára Gísladóttirs Silva, var både en rolig meditation for kontrabas og et forsøg på at portrættere hele livet: naturens mørke impulser, lysets lette spil og eksistensen som en tåget bevægelse ind og ud af det apokalyptisk-paradisiske.

This audio paper narrates through the experiences and ambiences of Russian aggression to which Ukrainians relate a long history of Russia’s imperial statehood. (Plokhy, 2023) It seeks a space of ethics in which sound expresses and gives testimonial to Ukrainian tragedy. In February 2023, Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko wrote an essay in which she claimed a justice-seeking quality to “cruel”, and “poor”, images, contesting a particular labeling of the images as “sensitive content”. (Iakovlenko, 2023) The audio paper resonates with Iakovlenko’s discussion, seeking a similar quality in “cruel”, and “poor”, sounds which were recorded hastily to make the war traceable in the experience of its victims. These sounds are not to be assessed for value-producing acoustics but fathomed in the actuality of ruination. 

I take ruination as a sonic state and worldly entanglement, mobilizing it as a force against which powers of resistance are measured. The audio paper invests in the exploration of Ukrainian resistance, locating in the world-ruining times a sonority of the Ukrainian desire to live and Russia’s genocidal intent to end Ukrainian living. 

Democratic conversation and collectively improvised music have such pronounced similarities that improvisations can be discussed in terms of their democratic potentiality. To do this, we firstly develop a democratic-communicative understanding of music as a communicative social interaction holding democratic potentials. This is done by applying the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas’ ideals for democratic conversation towards a musical context.

Secondly, we turn to our case study, Free Jazz Mod Paludan, a Danish activist community effort utilizing improvised musical noise as an audible protest against fascism and racism. Based on our theoretical understanding, we develop an analytically applicable framework structured through three levels of sociality. On a micro-social level, our analysis shows that the fulfillment of the democratic potentials of noise varies through both the establishment and lack of social ties between improvising Free Jazz Mod Paludan participants. On a meso-social level, noise shows to have potentials to both drown out contributions to the democratic conversation, as well as protecting and giving voice to marginalized groups. On a macro-social level, we find that Free Jazz Mod Paludan’s improvised noise potentially articulates specific political statements within a wider political discourse.

This elucidates the complex ways in which collectively improvised music and noise acts in a democratic conversation calling for critical attention towards democratic potentiality.

Abstract

The sound of the slogans at the demonstrations touches the body, it is impossible to hide from. The vulnerability revealed through this touch creates immediate affective responses pointing at the limitations of sonic support and solidarization. Despite the trouble of misunderstanding that often comes with sonic action as these limitations become tangible, thinking through sonic clashes also opens possibilities for a better understanding of sonic action.

The audio paper includes recordings from the events in solidarity with migrants and refugees from 2020 to 2022 in Athens, along with the autoethnographic sonic material about a demonstration against the russian invasion into Ukraine. The autoethnographic audio message was not meant for public ear and documents the backstage of institutional knowledge production. This study emphasises the necessity of thinking about the limitations of sonic solidarity as a part of the political agency of sound. It theorises sonic conflict and misunderstanding, questioning solidarization through sound by paying attention to the discrepancies of language and affect.

Abstract

This article researches the role of the Human body in the production of sound art. It focuses on the spatial path between body and sound in the exhibition space of sound art. This path is described by Barry Truax (1999) as the auditory channel. By examining the characteristics of the auditory channel, this paper asks how does the auditory channel produce a social event and affect navigation and orientation? How is it affected by the cultural context and the presence of the listeners? How does it create a private space through the use of technology? How does it contribute to the body’s expansion in sound spatiality and vice versa? This research is framed by artistic examples and by theoretical and conceptual resources, such as the work of Henri Lefebvre, Seth Kim-Cohen, Stuart Hall, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barry Blesser and Linda Salter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Brandon Labelle. From an aural perspective, the essay considers sound art as a public process, in which the visitor becomes, in Lefebvre's terms, a living body, simultaneously subject and object of the artwork.