audio cultures:

 

sounding out cultural studies

 

 

on this page

 

 

 

about audio cultures

 

The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media facilitates and fosters new dialogues across disciplinary formations, institutional settings, art forms and media. Contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie if you are interested in participating. A seminar around ‘audio cultures’ commenced in November 2008. In its first year of operation the audio_cultures seminar organised:

 

This seminar group has moved from a fortnightly discussion forum into a journal editorial team that drives the new ‘Interference’ journal. See 'interference'- online journal of audioculture studies call for papers

 

This seminar group began as a platform for the exploration of a number of concerns and issues related to the audio cultures and sonic environments and forms of modernity and is a point of departure for a discourse which engages concerns and issues that have emerged from the recent scholarship from composers, philosophers, cultural theorists and historians spanning such themes as the body, technology, philosophy and aesthetics, architecture and environments, memory, history and the archive. These include phenomenological, anthropological and sociological studies of sound, music and the listening subject, cultural histories of sound reproduction, a history of the senses, philosophical reflections on the ear, musical form and aesthetics and material from a wide number of sources across a diversity of disciplinary formations. Some questions and themes for consideration: does history have a sound and what does the past sound like? ; listening in and to the archive; what does architecture sound like?; the ear as prosthesis, sound as materiality and the materiality of sound; is there an ethics to listening ? how does sound work in the process of subjectivisation?; aural epistemologies, acoustic ecology and the ethnographic ear; the radio apparatus, practices and forms; audio‐spectrality and reproduction.

 

 

suggested readings

 

Adorno, T.W. 2002. Essays on Music. Berkeley: California
Attali, J. 1985 Noise: The political economy of music. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press.
Blesser, B. and Salter L.R. 2006. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural
Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Bull, M. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge
Bull, M. and Back, L. 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader Oxford. New York: Berg.
Corbin, A. 1999. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside.
London: Macmillan
Cox, C. and Warner, D. 2004. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. London: Continuum
Erlmann, V. (ed.) 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound Listening and Modernity. Oxford,
New York: Berg.
Hegarty, P. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. London: Continuum
Idhe, D. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. New York: SUNY
Kahn, D. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
(ed.) 1992. Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT
LaBelle, B. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum
Nancy, J.L. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham
Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction Durham, N.C.:
Duke
Szendy, P. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham
Weiss, A.S. (ed.) 2001. Experimental Sound and Radio New York, Cambridge: NYU, MIT

 

 

 

 

For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.