Abstract

MP3 changed the aural world as the first digital technology to compress audio, interpreting it through perceptual coding that models the standard human, hearing standard sounds, in order to sell and share them. Today, in the era of streaming and virtual meetings, bandwidth has become an even scarcer commodity: Artificial Intelligence comes to help, but the current codecs, such as Lyra by Google, or Opus, used by Whatsapp and Discord, present a sound reconstructed on the basis of their reference corpuses, and fine-tuned for speech – »good enough«, as defined by Sterne. A model is trained to efficiently distinguish noise from voiced information, and to rebuild a synthetic simulacrum of them, neutering context. When this happens, whose voice is your voice? Whose ears are your ears? And if, following Marius Schneider, sounds create the world, what is the world those models remember?

The research stems from a technical analysis of these codecs, their bias and their proven limits and virtues, to focus on the consequences of this widespread acceptance of apparently transparent audio transmission: a social, efficiency-driven homogenization of the soundscape; the elimination of more-than-human sounds. leading to a deeper dissonance in authenticity of the acoustic ecology; and creative possibilities hidden in abusing the emergence of meta-human debris.

Special thanks to Luigi Monteanni, Sissj Bassani and Pier Paolo Zimmermann.

This work is dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Sterne.

Abstract

Cultural practice in general is a slippery but deeply felt affair, where practitioners are often tasked with communicating the »underside of meaning« (Barthes, 1976). In algorithmic times, focusing on this task when working with machine learning outputs can offer an alternative to the pressure to consider quantifiable and easily machine-readable datasets as complete repositories of human knowledge. The multimodal knowledge held in sound and human experience is difficult to parse with data tools, e.g. machine learning, but the failures and messiness of these outputs add to our toolsets of constructing and reconstructing the worlds we offer in our stories. Through a presentation of some of Sinha’s discoveries navigating the worlds of theatre and machine learning-based audio research-creation, this audio paper offers examples of the possibilities of engaging with algorithmic failure as a deliberate strategy of discovery, to uplift the exploration of cultural possibilities and engage alternative models of community building and connection.

Abstract

An audio paper exploring the uncanny other world of the imagined consciousness of puppets. This sonic exploration of materialism and objects explores the sonority of puppets as an interface and space that explores sound from a novel non-human perspective. We will explore the relationships between human and puppet and the sounds of these interactions along with the delocalized anamnesis of historical puppet noises. This practice research explores narrative semiotics in the non-dialogue sound of puppetry and the expression in non-words and noise from the puppet perspective – the sound of a hand inside me, on me, holding me, touching me, manipulating me. How does the puppeteer talk to the puppet, how do they talk for the puppet, how does the puppet talk to others and what internal voice does the puppet have? Based on recordings from within a puppets body and the vocal of Matt Smith including found recordings of puppet voices and audio ephemera. The voice, though seemingly giving a particular marker of gender, is not fixed in a puppet and so potentially transgresses notions of identity and binaries. This ambiguity in the audio paper is intentional. 

Abstract

This paper explores how field recording practices can be impacted by concepts from the fields of energy production/efficiency (Lovins,1976) and energy ethics (Marder, 2017). 

We’ve seen greater focus on the agency of field recordists at work; from noisy non-presence (Wright, 2017), to extractivist listening (Robinson, 2020), yet attempts to capture worlds without anthropogenic noise persist (Winderen, 2019). Simultaneously, the embodied energies of recording tools have come under scrutiny (Polli, 2017, Wright 2022); where ethics of care are held close. 

But what of the field itself? From an energy perspective, we need actualisation rather than potential for fieldwork, and thus require the field to expend energy for our purposes. In this paper, I’ll look, via Michael Marder’s philosophical work, at how we have come to think of energy as a resource. How post-WWII optimism led to the energy crisis of the 1970s, and how mitigating strategies contributed to the present energy situation.

With reference to my own fieldwork: with more-than-human worlds in experimental nuclear fusion, and isostatic uplift in the Baltic, I consider the energy dynamics of human expectation and demand on the field itself and show, despite the best intentions, how we often still operate within 20C energy strategies and paradigms. 

I conclude by looking at Marder’s threefold alternative energy paradigm that reworks Aristotle’s energeia: energy as actualisation, not as potential, and how it might be applied to field recording practices in order to improve the balance going forward.

Abstract  

In this audio paper, I advance the concept of trans sound studies, a field that both theorizes and enacts how sonic practices can unsettle the presumed stability of voice, body, and gender. Drawing on trans studies, sound studies, and media archaeology, I situate the voice not as a transparent index of identity but as a mutable and more-than-human medium of experimentation. Through citations of historical speech synthesis, such as the Voder, CHANT and the DECtalk, as well as contemporary artistic practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Luca Soudant, the work demonstrates how technologies of vocal modulation open onto new sonic possibilities for gender beyond naturalization or legibility. Central to the paper is my own voice, spectrally manipulated in real time, foregrounding the critical potential of vocal unnaturalness as a practice of destabilization. In dialogue with theories of the »acousmatic question« (Eidsheim), trans operations (cárdenas), and trans*formative sonic thinking (Soudant), I propose trans sound studies as both an analytic and a creative method. It argues for embracing the alien and inhuman capacities of synthesized and modulated voices, not as failures of authenticity, but as generative openings for rethinking identity through sound.

Nær spidsen af Sjællands Odde ligger Yderby Lyng – en lille by i udkanten af Havnebyen, kendt fra DR3’s serie Doggy Style. Her finder man grillbaren Tunen, en shelterplads med havnedukkert og tidligere også hotelrestauranten Den Gyldne Hane. Serien skildrede de unges liv i et område, hvor København føles langt væk, både fysisk og mentalt. Egnen rummer både klassisk landområde med Holbæk som nærmeste by og Danmarks største sommerhusområde. Dertil er gamle gårde begyndt at tiltrække nye beboere, der bringer kaffelatte-kultur, økologiske boder og kunst med sig. Og nu også Lost Farm, en helt ny festival på en gård i Yderby Lyng, komplet med pop up-barer, pizzavogn, langborde, skulpturer, installationer, teltlejre og tre scener: The Pit, The Cave og The Barn.

Fredag eftermiddag, da jeg ankommer til Farmen, bliver jeg taget imod af Jude Bennett, gårdejer og kunstnerisk leder af festivalen. Jeg kommer efter den officielle åbningstale, men får en personlig rundvisning inden den første koncert.

Opera handler om forvandling. Enten forvandler aktørerne sig på scenen, eller også forvandles publikum – pludselig befinder vi os i en duel mellem venner på en slette uden for Skt. Petersborg eller på et kvistværelse i Paris, hvor en ung kvinde er ved at udånde af tuberkulose.

Også årets operafestival i København havde forvandlingen som omdrejningspunkt, men ofte i mere indirekte former. Her blev opera forstået som musikdramatik i intime formater, hvor små forestillinger på en times tid i beskedne lokaler bar programmet.

En myredronning fødes på scenen

På en kælderscene på Nørrebro (H20) tog Shlomi Moto Wagner publikum med ind i sin forestilling Salvation. Blåt glitter mod håbløshed og hjemve, rødt glitter mod depression og melankoli – med en gestus næsten rituel fordelte han farverne til dem, der ønskede det. Som en præst ved alteret markerede han os i panden, men tilsat dragkunstens lystfyldte energi og sanselige glæde. Transformationen var både konkret og symbolsk: en moderne nadver, hvor glitteret bar løftet om forandring.

»Jeg var en af dem, der var meget kritisk i starten,« siger Henrik Tinggaard fra Danmarksdemokraterne til reporteren fra TV Midtvest – »men jeg har ændret holdning.« Midt i virakken af den ekstatiske lydkunstinstallation Kanonslag står han i bedste sendetid med Struers borgmester og diskuterer, om politikerne kan tillade sig at bruge så mange skattekroner på at promovere Struer som »Lydens By«. Siden finanskrisen i 2008 har kommunen investeret tungt i at rebrande byen for at tiltrække og fastholde arbejdskraft, og Struer Tracks  – biennale for lyd og lytning, i år med temaet »Kommunal praksis« – er bare ét af mange tiltag. 

Tilrettelæggeren kunne ikke have valgt et bedre sted til interviewet: For hvem kan have noget imod det nostalgitrippende legeland, som spilopmagerne i den norske kunstnerduo Samvær Under Tilsün har skabt i det tomme lokale ved siden af brugsen? Selv den mest surmulende rindalist må trække på smilebåndet i mødet med værkets overgearede påfund. Hovedattraktionen er et bordtennisspil, pimpet med sensorer, så hvert slag med bolden former en fragmenteret chiptune-komposition ledsaget af farverige 16-bit animationer på det pixelerede net.

Super-idyllic Savonlinna lies deep inside Finland – four hours by bus from Helsinki or a short 45-minute flight. A postcard-perfect town in the midst of some of the country’s most beautiful nature, where lakes, islands, and forests endlessly flow into one another. On a small island rises a raw yet well-preserved medieval castle, perfectly sized to hold a stage and more than 2,000 audience members in its courtyard. That was precisely why the idea for an opera festival emerged here in 1912 – one of the oldest of its kind in the world.

Opera can be many things – affected, extremely moving, snobbish, tear-inducing, dreadfully boring, or simply too much. This very range makes it the most fascinating – and the most expensive – of all the musical art forms. The question is whether it makes a particular difference that a production takes place in such picturesque and historically authentic surroundings, or whether the castle merely functions as decorative scenery, adding a feel-good effect for an exclusive audience enjoying their white wine with extra pleasure during intermission at a genuine medieval fortress.