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.

Abstract

 Kevin J Gordon1; Matthias Kispert 2, 3 Andile L Sibiya 4,5 
 
1 Department of Music, College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; 
2 Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London, UK; 
3 London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK. 
4 Discipline of Otorhinolaryngology, School of Clinical Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa; 
5 KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health, South Africa 

Operating rooms are typically noise filled environments, where polyrhythms and polyphonics of human and non-human sounds collide. In this paper the operating room soundscape is used for relational ethnographic exploration, framed in critical affect theory, and brings together insights from medical sociology and sound studies.  

This paper is set in an operating theatre where cochlear implantation surgery is taking place. In the process of surgically enabling sound perception.  Sounds within the operating room are found to have agency warranting conscious perception.  Within the composition, we reflect on multiple interdependencies through sound, between individuals, teams, tools and machines.  Through inclusion of human and non-human sounds we see chaos and conflict, independence and co-dependence, and ultimately collaboration in a shared goal of both human and non-human elements to achieve the best outcome for the patient asleep on the operating table.  

In this paper sounds are intrinsic essential actors as sound perception is surgically restored.  Sound is acknowledged in its action as a key component of the operating room team. 

Abstract

In the audio-paper Fear of Weakness: Songs to Agitate the Man, artist Morten Poulsen builds on his project Boys Will Be… (2022), in which he met with young cis-men to have conversations about vulnerability, intimacy and masculine norms. In the end of these meetings, Morten recorded the men giggling, and these recordings were then presented as a sound installation. Listening back to these recordings, and informed by both sound and gender studies, Morten explores the deficiencies of masculinity norms and the fear of being exposed as non-masculine. How might the sound of giggling cultivate a softening of hardened spaces, and encourage a reflection on the way that men relate to each other? How might the sound of giggling men serve as a noise in the patriarchal system?

Abstract

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by »rejecting the solidity of a frame« (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged between minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance sounds a formless formation, exploring integrity and wholeness among Black and Indigenous collectives that organize via radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about individual moral virtue but rather a collective ontological state of being whole.

Abstract

This audio paper explores the »acoustic territory« (Labelle, 2010) of Peckham Rye Lane through my sonic journey as a Peckham resident, practitioner, and researcher. My relationship with this place has expanded throughout my studies, moving beyond the simple notion of documentation or representation from an »outsider« angle. Instead, as a resident, I have apprehended my methodologies of listening and representing sound through my everyday life of living in Peckham and my involvement with different community groups.