Abstracts

(Last updated 14 April 2022)

Keynote Lectures

Eric DROTT (The University of Texas at Austin), Streaming, Sleep, and the Crises of Social Reproduction
Mack HAGOOD (Miami University), Tinnitus and the Politics of Listening

Themed Sessions

Session 1a: Class & Stratum
Friday, April 15, 09:00–11:00 (UTC+9)

Chair: Steve JONES (University of Illinois Chicago)

09:00–09:30 Nimalan YOGANATHAN (Concordia University), Aural Counterpublic Resistance:
Noise, Silence and Acoustical Agency in Protest Tactics

09:30–10:00 David KJAR (Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University), Sounding
New Old-Music for 21st-Century Royalty: Commissioning Early Music at the Pine
Island Music Festival

10:00–10:30 Patrick MITCHELL (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music),
Communicating Rage: Multifaceted Resistance as Sonic Protest in Rage Against the
Machine’s Self-Titled Album (1992)

10:30–11:00 Andrés TORRES (Universidad de Antioquia), The Sound Identity of the Resistance:
Testimonies and Canyon Songs that Fluid Through a Sound Cloud that Stands a
Fight Against a Megaproject

Nimalan YOGANATHAN (Concordia University)
Aural Counterpublic Resistance: Noise, Silence and Acoustical Agency in Protest Tactics

This paper examines tactical uses of noise and silence as practices of refusal and resistance. I study how rioters in the French banlieues (i.e. low-income housing complexes) as well as social movements like Black Lives Matter and the Indigenous-led Idle No More to deploy noise as both a tactic and protest aesthetic in order to construct what I term aural counterpublics. Such counterpublics allow marginalised communities to use sound as a means of amplifying their grievances and right to exist. I also listen to the performative silence of Black NFL football player Marshawn Lynch. I argue that Lynch’s refusal to speak to the predominantly white media during 2013 and 2014 can be understood as a tactic for covertly circulating counter-discourses and subjugated knowledge that challenge white norms of blackness and respectability. I challenge the tendency within dominant discourse to confine silence and ‘civil’ protest to a politics of respectability. The case studies outlined in this paper demonstrate how aural counterpublic resistance is invested in agitating the status quo rather than assimilating into norms of appropriate decorum. Furthermore, I aim to highlight how both loud and quiet creative tactics permit racialised groups or individuals to assert their agency and “speak back” to dominant narratives in quotidian yet powerful ways. [back to top]

David KJAR (Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University)
Sounding New Old-Music for 21st-Century Royalty: Commissioning Early Music at the Pine Island Music Festival

Supported by interviews with performers, patrons, and audience members, as well as images, scores, and recordings—this paper explores the inner workings of modern early music patronage through a revivalist lens. It reveals the various ways patrons today identify with early music and early-music ensembles through commissioning projects designed to reenact the Baroque splendor of music patronage. Historically apropos, the 1000 Island region still boasts pre-depression-era castles erected by New York City business elites, such as George Boldt (Boldt Castle) and Frederick Bourne (Singer Castle). Residents still signify their not-so-distant 1000-Island history by supporting local revivalist endeavors, ranging from historical boating to historical musicking. Thus, this paper sheds new light on the behind-the-scenes role of early music patrons in cultivating a local early music sound and, inversely, reveals how historically informed performers develop patronage significantly different from that of modern ensembles. Beyond financial enabling, in what ways, from a sound aesthetic and outreach standpoint, do such quasi-aristocratic patronage practices cultivate, limit, and ultimately shape early music performance today? And how do performers and patrons together craft such performative relationships built on the problematic (but highly tantalizing) premise of so-called authentic performance? I reveal such relationships through critical socio-musical readings of the Pine Island commissions that detail how musical, textual, and textural new-old elements in these works preserve the subtle (and not-so-subtle) relationships between performer, patron, space, and place. [back to top]

Patrick MITCHELL (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)
Communicating Rage: Multifaceted Resistance as Sonic Protest in Rage Against the Machine’s Self-Titled Album (1992)

Rage Against the Machine (RATM) is an interracial alternative-rock band widely known for their eclectic musical style and polemic protest lyrics. The Los Angeles group released their album Rage Against the Machine (1992), in the months following a revolutionary moment of racial tension and civil unrest during the Rodney King Riots. Political unrest fueled RATM’s critique of issues surrounding capital accumulation, systematic racism, and U.S. imperialism. Sociologists Andrew Green (2015), Nick Holm (2007), and Jeffery Hall (2003) have considered RATM’s protest in their studies of the band’s lyrics—however, have reduced their music to descriptions of “genre-bending.” These studies fail to observe the significance of the genres prevalent in RATM’s sound (i.e., funk, metal, rap and rock). This begs the question: How did RATM sonically communicate their rage? My study of RATM’s album considers both the band’s music and vocality to articulate the full depth of their protest. I argue that RATM constructed a sonic protest through means of synthesizing interracial musical genres by revealing the inherent rebellion instilled in the fabrics of funk, metal, rap and rock. Specifically, I identify the band’s use of funk riffs (Morant 2010), metal breakdowns (Susino 2019), rap flow (Komaniecki 2019), and timbral distortion. Moreover, I use Kate Heidemann’s technique for describing vocal timbres (2016) in my analysis of singer Zack de la Rocha’s enraged vocality. My examination of RATM’s album demonstrates that their music and vocality not only creates a sonic protest but opens space for multifaceted resistance. [back to top]

Andrés TORRES (Universidad de Antioquia)
The Sound Identity of the Resistance: Testimonies and Canyon Songs that Fluid Through a Sound Cloud that Stands a Fight Against a Megaproject

The Ríos Vivos Movement fights for the rights of the communities affected by the Ituango Hydroelectric Megaproject whose main shareholders include institutions and companies that belong to the region and their administration is the responsibility of the Colombian state. Located in the northwest of the department of Antioquia, the hydroelectric plant blocked the Cauca River with a 225-meter-high concrete wall and confined its waters in an 80-kilometer reservoir that extends along the Cauca River Canyon. This changed forever the ecosystem of the region, affecting the basic subsistence conditions of the population that depend on the Cauca, which is the second most important river in the country. This paper will show how the Ríos Vivos Movement, based on a sound files in the Sound Cloud platform, opposes the monopolization and control of messages issued by the communication channels managed by the hydroelectric plant, where the institutionalization of the silence apart of ensuring the power of discourse reveals a mechanism of censorship and repression. Following Jacques Attali’s concepts about how listening to acoustic messages is at the same time an act of appropriation and control that implies a reflection on power and that in essence configures a political act, notions such as noise, subversion and entertainment will be explored in music such as Trovas Cañoneras (Canyon Songs) and the audio-testimonies of fishermen and peasants, where sound is a mean to read the codes of their resistance and is a tool for the consolidation of a community. [back to top]

Session 1b: Sound, Class, and Technology
Friday, April 15, 09:00–10:30 (UTC+9)

Chair: Mack HAGOOD (Miami University)

09:00–09:30 Jordan ZALIS (Memorial University), Net Effects: Listening to Basketball in Toronto

09:30–10:00 Stefan GREENFIELD-CASAS (Northwestern University), Video Games Alive:
(Re)playful Listenings in Video Game Music Concerts

10:00–10:30 Cody BLACK (Duke University), Headphonic Ignorance: Wireless Headphones,
Anticipatory Listening, and (In)audible Disconnect of Everyday Movement in
South Korea

Jordan ZALIS (Memorial University)
Net Effects: Listening to Basketball in Toronto

Associations between individual and group identity and spectacular forms of sport are increasingly prominent in Canada today, and, indeed, the world of resource-centred praxis: “I extract, therefore I am.” Convolving the varied set of sonic and subjective experience afforded by Toronto Raptors basketball (the only National Basketball Association team in Canada), Net Effects analyzes the practices, protocols, techniques, and technologies (Marra and Trotta 2019) that mediate the soundscape, revealing who, how, and what is ensounded and brought into social life. Combining Robinson’s (2020) critical listening positionality with Berger’s (1999; 2009; 2019) phenomenological approaches to the study of musical experience, Net Effects operationalizes “sonorities research / sonoridades” (Castanheira et al. 2020) to the question, “What does basketball sound like?” to probe and pique the ways in which sound makes a difference in Canadian society. While distributed transnationally, locally (i.e., in-and-around-arena), Raptors basketball is an intimate, performative, atmospheric (Jack 2021), “immersive brand experience” worked by the affective labour of about twenty-five key performers (dancers, DJs, athletes, drummers, and emcees), who, by rule, use hip hop culture to stimulate massive participation while demonstrating “disruption, strength, and pride,” according to brand management, officially. Most famously, the efforts are led by the team’s global brand ambassador, the Canadian hip hop icon, Drake. Drawing on ethnographic work with fans, performers, and management, this paper highlights the conditional place that nation and race occupy in Canada while examining the role that sonic encounters at sporting events play with respect to the construction and communication of (post)colonial identities. [back to top]

Stefan GREENFIELD-CASAS (Northwestern University)
Video Games Alive: (Re)playful Listenings in Video Game Music Concerts

Though video game music concerts have existed in Japan since the late 1980s, their popularity has exponentially increased in recent years, with concerts now spanning the globe and running the gamut from special, limited shows to touring, ongoing concert series. This paper considers video game music concerts from a phenomenological perspective rooted in fandom. That is, what does the experience of attending these concerts entail for these fans? In examining fans’ relations to these performances, their emotional and material investment in the (live) music, and their personal memories of the multimedia they bring to these concerts, I ultimately argue that concertgoers experience a (re)mediated replaying of the games through the event, what I call “replayful listening.” Moreover, this type of listening is one specifically afforded by the ludic technologies of video games (akin to cinematic listening and film; cf. Cenciarelli 2021). I will merge two theoretical stances together to support this argument: the first takes theories of liveness (Auslander 2008; Sanden 2019) and examines how the event (Abbate 2004; Van Elferen 2020) of the concert reconjures audience members’ memories of playing the source game; the second considers theoretical models of listening, weaving together existing theories of listening to revisit and add a new dimension to what Tim Summers (2021) has recently deemed “playful listenings,” a ludomusical “potential to be otherwise” (702). I contend that concert arrangements not only realize this potential, but also enable a virtual “hearing double” (Szendy 2008) for the concertgoer who has played the source game. [back to top]

Cody BLACK (Duke University)
Headphonic Ignorance: Wireless Headphones, Anticipatory Listening, and (In)audible Disconnect of Everyday Movement in South Korea

As wireless Bluetooth headphones advance in both noise-cancellation efficacy and mass affordability, their increasingly ubiquitous presence in the ears of Koreans in public transportation across Seoul affords a greater individual capacity to reorient their everyday sensibilities. Though scholars have keenly characterized how technologically mediated form of listening affects individual relationships to space, attuning to the experiential qualities of aural attention and silent absence (Hagood 2019; Larkin 2014), I opine that a critical temporal interrogation of headphone listening is necessary to articulate the everyday preoccupation these Koreans have with their own becoming, specifically through the neoliberal mode of self-managed cultivation. Drawing from an ethnography of listening in/of/through Gangnam Station, this paper examines how Koreans utilize headphones aurally manage public distraction in their everyday mobilities relative to work amid the chaotic soundscape of Seoul’s mass transit. By taking into consideration how neoliberal labor practices instill the propensity that Koreans everyday life demands efficient movement relative to their workplace, I consider how the practice of a headphonic ignorance shapes temporal sensibilities of everyday movement to optimize the unproductive time spent transiting across Seoul, listening for instances of how Koreans succumb to an ineffable pull of labor-related anticipation that demands they be somewhere else at the expense of the present. I argue headphones offer an insurance and assurance that the orientational movements of anticipation can be practiced with minimal interruption, resisting meanwhile the noises within their immediate present that may threaten their finely attuned means of movement towards a demanded and anticipated future. [back to top]

Session 2a: Gender & Sexuality, Part 1
Friday, April 15, 11:00–13:00 (UTC+9)

Chair: Hyunseok KWON (Hanyang University)

11:00–11:30 Lara BALIKCI (McGill University), A Queer Phenomenology of Furniture Music: A
Case Study of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969) as Musical Furniture

11:30–12:00 Yiqing MA (University of Michigan), Theorizing Vocal Timbre: Gender Performance
and Transgression in J-pop

12:00–12:30 Sunhong KIM (University of Michigan), Gender Association in Traditional Korean
Sound in Hallyu

12:30–13:00 Madeleine FRIESEN (University of Toronto), Transvocalisms: Technology and
(Tres)passing as Sound Education

Lara BALIKCI (McGill University)
A Queer Phenomenology of Furniture Music: A Case Study of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969) as Musical Furniture

I am sitting in a room: a statement famously pronounced by the American experimental composer, Alvin Lucier (1931-2021). Perhaps we have not yet fully considered how the room, in some way, also sits with us. How did we come to take up the room in which we sit and what do we hear and/or listen to in these spaces? These are some of the questions regarding furniture music (music that is heard but not listened to) prompted by feminist scholar, Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (Ahmed 2006), which is not a phenomenology of queer experience, but rather, a queering of phenomenology. Like Gavin Lee (Lee 2020), I foreground queer phenomenology as disorientation. In this paper, I argue that music theory can address disorienting experiences of sonic objects, bodies, spaces, and the relationship between them through an analytical case study of Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969): a recording of multiple generations of re-recorded spoken text repeated into a room. I argue for a queer phenomenological interpretation of the piece as (meta-)furniture music. I present two analytical visualizations of the piece’s transformational process: a bar graph and a collection of analytical images. The bar graph maps the formally differentiated sections that result from Lucier’s compositional process over the resonance of the resulting music. The collection of analytical images reflects the poetic transformation that occurs in the composition. I conclude that Lucier’s utilization of space instrumentalizes “the room” in which the piece exists. [back to top]

Yiqing MA (University of Michigan)
Theorizing Vocal Timbre: Gender Performance and Transgression in J-pop

Shiina Ringo is one of the most recognized Japanese popular music artists, known for her diverse music performances styles with inspirations from Japanese traditional music and arts. Cultural historian Csaba Toth (2006) has recognized her influence on young Japanese female identities by creating a transgressive version of Japanese femininity through boundary-crossings. Van (2020) and Mata (2019) have studied her relationship to the “geographical urban” in Tokyo, constructing a community that is bonded by the urban peripheries and aesthetics that are shared within. Inspired by previous works that recognize the gender signification of vocality through imitations (Cox 2016; Heidemann 2016; Duguay 2021), this paper seeks to propose a framework to study gender performativity and transgression in Japanese popular music (J-pop) through listeners’ embodiment in Shiina’s vocal performance. I will discuss how Shiina’s vocal timbre contributed to constructing different images of femininities. By analyzing visual images, lyrics, and vocal timbre in Instinct (1999), Crime and Punishment (2017), and Ma Vie, Mes Rêves (2017), I argue that Shiina had to reinvent different images of femininity, the “punk youth” and the “maternal maturity,” to thrive through her long performance career. As reflected in these recordings, Shiina’s vocal timbre transforms and negotiates between a Western-rooted head voice and chest voice and a Japanese folk-inspired Jigoe, Uragoe, and Kobushi. I conclude that different vocal timbre strengthens various images of Japanese femininity that transgress from the mainstream female J-pop artists and groups. It provides alternative forms of femininities for her female fans to engage and participate in. [back to top]

Sunhong KIM (University of Michigan)
Gender Association in Traditional Korean Sound in Hallyu

This paper explores how a hybrid music form called fusion kugak (traditional Korean music blended with any musical genres) connects with current socio-cultural manifestations of gender presentation in contemporary South Korean society. As K-pop has formed a significant aspect of contemporary South Korean culture internally and transnationally, contemporary music producers, receivers, and institutions have sought “K-sound” in order to identify a linear soundscape for South Koreans. The recent rapid increase in attention paid to K-pop has led to excessive patriotism among Koreans but K-pop itself cannot be linked to the international image of traditional Korea (Lie 2012). As such, fusion kugak, with kugak mainly serving as the primary style of this genre, has emerged as a new popular style of music in numerous forms of mass media where it goes by such names as pungnyudaejang, chosŏn-pop, and kugak-pop. I argue that the presentational style of fusion kugak performances queers orthodox Korean gender normativity, but the musical texture and timbre in this new form of fusion kugak are also associated with the masculine features that predominantly appear in the highly gendered world of kugak. Lee’s sonic depiction of kugak instruments as “raspy and scratchy” (1997, 53) is associated with the sonic qualities that new fusion kugak musicians are directed to present as such sonic illustrations are considered to be one of the primary evaluations in the mainstream kugak male musicianship. This paper thus explores the shifting presentation of sonic embodiment in Korean sound by interpreting it through gender association. [back to top]

Madeleine FRIESEN (University of Toronto)
Transvocalisms: Technology and (Tres)passing as Sound Education

Trans-singers in choral spaces are faced with binary inequities regarding not only language and representation, but the very quality of the voice; defined by sexual dimorphism, choral practice sustains both the ideal of an essential, gendered voice, and the enculturated framework which enables its perception. However, sound reveals nothing original about gender, which is instead formed with and through the sonic. Gender operates as technology in the vocalic classroom, specifying gendered protocols, operating through cisnormative mechanics, and producing binary musical practices, language, and voices. Transgender singers often bear the pain of marking the limits of the authentic, gendered voice perpetuated by the choral format, but error in the cisnormative choral machine need not be confined to the transgender voice; vocalic glitches occur in all gendered and can reveal the ways gendered binaries have congealed into what appears to be the ontological in choral practice. With the move to online musicking necessitated by the global pandemic, vocal-choral educators can turn to physical, analog, and digital voice alteration technologies, including artificially intelligent “voice skins,” not only in facilitating the “passing” of trans-students in binary spaces, but also enabling the sonic (tres)passing across the terrain of the gendered vocal-choral class for both cis- and trans-students. (Tres)passing provides the potential of “staying with glitch” for trans- and nontrans vocal-choral students, unhinging what is seen as an authentic, essential connection between phono- and pheno-typicalities and opening possibilities for the reconsideration of the mechanics of a binary, cisnormative vocalic classroom. [back to top]

Session 2b: Sound Studies in Action
Friday, April 15, 11:00–12:30 (UTC+9)

Chair: Kayoung LEE (Sungshin Women’s University)

11:00–11:30 Francesca INGLESE (Northeastern University), Beyond the Binary: Race and Sonic
Orientation in Coloured Popular Musicking

11:30–12:00 Michael FRISHKOPF (University of Alberta), The Sonorous, Audible Mosque

12:00–12:30 Young Eun KIM (University of California, Santa Cruz), A Study on the Origins of “Ear
Training” in the Modernization Period of Korea: Japanese Music Education and
Military Training

Francesca INGLESE (Northeastern University)
Beyond the Binary: Race and Sonic Orientation in Coloured Popular Musicking

Coloured South Africans—an apartheid category for those deemed to be of “mixed race” descent—have long been marginalized by a Black/white racial binary that framed their identities and cultural practices as degraded and derivative. In this presentation, I address the role of cover song performances of English-language and (mostly) American popular love songs—known locally as “sentimentals”—in the context of Cape Town’s Kaapse klopse (clubs of the Cape) practice. Klopse are multigenerational parading music and dance groups that have been a feature of public life in Cape Town since the mid-1800s when the city’s creolized urban ex-slave population remixed local musical practices with globally circulating performance repertoires. Drawing on personal interviews, informal conversations and debates, and the observation of thousands of cover song performances during participatory ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2011-2014, I posit that singers’ earnest renditions of mostly American popular songs work to circulate affect within the klopse community, creating links with a deep local history of public amateur renditions of mass-mediated popular songs. These performances craft aesthetics beyond a racial/aesthetic binary that re-center musicking and musical value around community tradition and the feelings produced through iterative listening. Drawing on Sara Ahmed (2006), I frame this as a kind of sentimental orientation that aligns participants with the past and with place in particular ways, and in the process frames sounding as a dynamic sensory experience rather than a matter of cultural (or racial) authenticity. [back to top]

Michael FRISHKOPF (University of Alberta)
The Sonorous, Audible Mosque

We perceive the world through multiple senses. Unlike the gustatory, tactile, and olfactory, visual and auditory senses enable perception at a distance, representing the wider physical and social spaces in which we live. While the mind’s eye appears to represent three-dimensional reality better than its ear, hearing is more deeply enmeshed in social life. Western cultures privilege light and seeing for understanding (“insight” over “hearsay”), as does academia, where material things are studied as visual culture. Yet we also hear architecture. Furthermore, sound and audition are profoundly social compared to light and vision. Those deprived of hearing are far more isolated than those deprived of sight. Muslim devotions center on remembering God through sounded words. Mosque design is perforce sonic, its structures—minaret, dome, or carpet—designed to enhance collective soundings and hearings: the call (adhan) to prayer (salah), the sermon (khutba), the supplication (duʿaʾ), Qur’anic recitation (tilawa). Sonorous and audible mosques resonate, shaping one another dynamically, facilitating harmonization with local social life. Yet most studies of Islamic architecture reduce the mosque to visual, asocial representations, idealized as a static image, devoid of people or sound, reduced further to a sketch or axonometric projection. Such silent, asocial representations may suffice to write cultural histories, but they fail to convey the richness of spiritual experience. I therefore reframe the mosque as sonorous and audible, its soundscapes as flexible architectural features shaping and shaped by spiritual meaning, towards a more holistic understanding of mosques, and of Muslim life and faith. [back to top]

Young Eun KIM (University of California, Santa Cruz)
A Study on the Origins of “Ear Training” in the Modernization Period of Korea: Japanese Music Education and Military Training

The rapid modernization of Korea in the early 20th century engendered an overarching reorganization of traditional values and long-established social structures. Alongside this change, the auditory sense of Koreans underwent a profound modification in the process of adopting Westernized Japanese music during the Japanese occupation. In particular, with the introduction of ear training. Ear training is an activity that requires identifying and labeling musical patterns upon listening to a set of musical tones. The purpose of such training is to develop the recognition of and the ability to accurately represent pitch, which is widely considered one of the most significant elements in Western music. The origin of ear training begins from standard Japanese music education around the turn of the century, when ear training became distorted through Japan’s militarization amid the Sino-Japanese War. It was then introduced into Korean music education during the 1940s. This research paper examines the background and meaning of ear training within the historical context of Imperial Japan and its influence on its then-colony, Korea. In the documents witnessing ear training of that time, the traces of those who designed or experienced ear training can be found in the form of interviews, journals, news articles, scores, and sound files. While navigating those source materials, this paper examines the rise of ear training as a national defense strategy in both countries, and absolute pitch training through listening to fighter planes and Underwater Sound Survey in Japan and its effects. [back to top]

Session 3a: Gender & Sexuality, Part 2
Saturday, April 16, 11:00–12:30 (UTC+9)

Chair: Eric DROTT (The University of Texas at Austin)

11:00–11:30 Melek CHEKILI (University of Southern California), From Silence to Music: Alternative
Voices to Bear Witness in Les Silences Du Palais (Tlatli, 1994)

11:30–12:00 AM MEDINA (University of California, San Diego), Toward a Trans of Color Sound
Studies: Annihilation, Silence, and Listening Against the Necropolitical

12:00–12:30 Iris BLAKE (University of California, Los Angeles), Sounding Queer Futurities in
Larissa Lai’s Speculative Fiction

Melek CHEKILI (University of Southern California)
From Silence to Music: Alternative Voices to Bear Witness in Les Silences Du Palais (Tlatli, 1994)

Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli’s Les Silences du Palais (1994) stages the traumatic situation of women servants living in the lower floor of the Palace of the Bey, right before Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956. The story is told through flashback memories of Alia, a young singer, who returns to the palace she grew up in. Film critics have often focused on the flashbacks as a reflection of a trans-generational trauma transmitted from Alia’s mother’s silence regarding the identity of her father. This paper turns instead towards the potentiality of music and the singing voice; Alia developed a strong connexion to singing and playing the lute in her childhood in the confinements of the palace when dealing with gender, sexual and political trauma. The paper studies the complexity of the singing voice often presented in Arab-Muslim cultures as the frustrated scream of those considered voiceless, and analyzes the transition within a traumatic context, from the voice as an object for feminine sexualization, to its transgressivity, interrupting the very possibility of the gaze of the Other (that of patriarchy and colonization). It, also, investigates the (im)possibility of the voice as an escape, a first step towards the freedom from the silences of the palace. In conclusion, the voice’s liberating potential lies in its materiality. The filmmaker makes sure to render the verbal exchanges limited, while directing the attention towards “petty sounds’’, music and a silence which is not one. [back to top]

AM MEDINA (University of California, San Diego)
Toward a Trans of Color Sound Studies: Annihilation, Silence, and Listening Against the Necropolitical

Trans people of color (TPoC) are not merely left to die by the indifference of the US settler-colonial state, but instead are murdered by ideologies of dehumanization that render these subjects outside the purview of human rights. In essence, they are denied the “slow death” (Berlant 2007) of neoliberal capitalist subjectivity, instead developing a psychic and affective condition produced by the necropolitical (Mbembe 2003, 2019). Put simply, TPoC are always dying, even in so-called “life”. This paper turns to sound studies not simply to assuage the “fast death” of trans of color necropolitics, but instead to argue that listening, as the daily interaction with the sonic, manifests a politics to assert trans of color life in the face of death. In my paper, I consider how the house music artist Byrell the Great’s track “Legendary Children,” which features a soundbite with the voice of murdered trans woman Venus Xtravaganza (featured in the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning), might counteract annihilationist logics of the necropolitical. Drawing on trans/queer of color critique (Muñoz 2009; Snorton 2017) and psychoanalytic strains of critical race studies (Fanon 1952; Viego 2007; Mbembe 2003, 2019), I discuss the ways that quotidian engagement with sound offers the possibility for finding new, utopian life for trans of color subjects. Ultimately, listening against the necropolitical demonstrates and points to the potential for sound studies to be used in political projects that combat transphobic and racist violence. [back to top]

Iris BLAKE (University of California, Los Angeles)
Sounding Queer Futurities in Larissa Lai’s Speculative Fiction

Through an analysis of the interlinking of voice and memory in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and The Tiger Flu (2018), this paper examines the potentials for speculative fiction to enact speculative sound performance as a tactic to envision and make possible queer futurities. Whereas voice is typically imagined as sonic and human, Lai’s speculative fictions re-imagine voice as intertwined not only with acoustic sound, but also with memory, scent, and land. A queer dystopian love story where the past leaks into the present (105), Salt Fish Girl persistently relates voice not primarily to the ear or the throat but rather to the feet and the tongue as multisensory contact zones that are fraught with power relations: memories and scents of both colonial violence and decolonial possibilities come up through the ground, through the soles/souls of the feet. Also following genetically modified queer femme protagonists navigating a dystopic not-too-distant future, The Tiger Flu engages the combined literary/sonic contours of voice and memory through the repurposing of popular song lyrics and the centrality of oral knowledge transmission to a group of parthenogenic women in the midst of a pandemic. Engaging sound studies, literary studies, performance studies, and queer studies, I argue that these works of speculative fiction activate speculative modes of sounding, sensing, and being that are ultimately optimistic about the capacity to use the detritus of the dystopic present to (re)make queer, decolonial futurities. [back to top]

Session 3b: Sound Studies Contextualized
Saturday, April 16, 11:00–13:00 (UTC+9)

Chair: Jungwon Kim (Yonsei University)

11:00–11:30 Hee Seng KYE (Hanyang University), Mixtape, Walkman, and Generation X: Tracing
Nostalgia in Guardians of the Galaxy

11:30–12:00 Yi Eun CHUNG (Hanyang University), Singing Elite Christians: Christianity and the
Rise of Folk Music in South Korea, 1968–1975

12:00–12:30 Hye Eun CHOI (New York University Shanghai), Re-imagining “Tears of Mokp’o”:
From a Korean Resistance Anthem to a Baseball Fight Song

12:30–13:00 Tadahiko IMADA (Hirosaki University), Out of Deconstruction: Creating Alternative
Music for Children through the Sound Education

Hee Seng KYE (Hanyang University)
Mixtape, Walkman, and Generation X: Tracing Nostalgia in Guardians of the Galaxy

The present study attempts close analysis of Peter Quill’s “Awesome Mix Vol. 1” in the film Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Standing as “cultural reference points” to Earth, the songs compiled in this “interstellar mixtape” are inherently nostalgic. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the popular culture and mass media shape the perceptions of the past, but the question remains, what is so “awesome” about the mixtape featuring music from the 1970s that it not only mediates but projects nostalgia? The discussion begins with not the tape but the character Quill, or two biographical notes about him that have gone unnoticed in the literature: (1) conceived in 1980, he belongs to Generation X; and (2) Quill himself is of a “mixed” race, i.e., half-human, half-alien. Drawing on the seminal work by Svetlana Boym (2001), I first show the ways in which Boym’s two forms of nostalgia—restorative and reflective—are at work in building Quill’s identity, or lack thereof (hence Gen “X”). I then trace the processes through which Quill’s double identity—Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord—is configured by music and, more important, a specific mode of listening. The Walkman Quill carries across galaxies is the original 1979 Sony Walkman TPS-L2 inherited from his late mother. It is what Shuhei Hosokawa (1984) calls the “autonomy-of-the-walking-self,” allowing Quill to move in time and space. If the original Walkman tamed the “urban” spaces on Earth, however, Quill’s (and the music it plays) urbanizes “outer” spaces, shared as a symbol of identity—and love. [back to top]

Yi Eun CHUNG (Hanyang University)
Singing Elite Christians: Christianity and the Rise of Folk Music in South Korea, 1968–1975

In the late twentieth century after the Korean war, South Korea saw the massive influx of American culture. In the process of this cultural influx from outside, mainly from the US, the modernization process of South Korea, which can be roughly summarized with the keywords such as Westernization, industrialization, and urbanization, fundamentally transformed Korean society. Particularly, folk music—imported with other cultural products from the US in the late 1960s—played a significant role in newly emerging youth culture in Korea. The young generation in the late-1960s to mid-1970s Korea gradually constructed their own culture through the imported cultural products including music, differentiating themselves from the older generation. This newly formed youth culture engendered various discourses on what the ethically righteous youth culture is. The Christianity in South Korea also had a deep relation with the youth culture in this period. In particular, the various Christian organizations actively made use of folk songs and sing-along events to propagate Christianity in South Korea. In this talk, I will examine the underexplored link between Christian and folk music culture of South Korean youth from the late 1960s to mid 1970s. By investigating various discourses on the relationship between Christian and popular music, I will attempt to articulate the role of South Korean Christianity in the emerging cultural identity of Korean popular music. [back to top]

Hye Eun CHOI (New York University Shanghai)
Re-imagining “Tears of Mokp’o”: From a Korean Resistance Anthem to a Baseball Fight Song

A 1966 New York Times article, titled “Koreans Recall ‘Tears of Mokp’o’,” describes how the historically prosperous port city of Mokp’o had been left behind in the course of South Korea’s rapid economic growth. The stifling politico-economic conditions of Mokp’o and the broader Chŏlla region, where the city is located, were sources of contention in South Korea throughout the second half of the twentieth century. It is interesting that the writer of the article, Emerson Chapin, used the title of the popular love song “Tears of Mokp’o” to metaphorically accentuate the frustration and resentment of Mokp’o’s citizens. Although this usage of the song might have seemed creative to readers of the New York Times then, many Koreans would have taken it for granted. Since its original release in 1935, “Tears of Mokp’o” has been understood as a metonym for a politically oppressed and economically exploited colonial Korea. As with Chapin’s article, the strained politico-economic realities and associated imagery of the Chŏlla region were well-known in postwar South Korea. Accordingly, in the 1980s and 90s fans of the Kwangju-based Haitai Tigers baseball team adopted “Tears of Mokp’o” as their unofficial anthem. Haitai fans were passionate about their team, since the Tigers were formidable despite coming from a politically oppressed and economically neglected part of the country. With their traumatic memories of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, when many citizens of Kwangju were brutalized and killed by the South Korean military, Haitai fans sang “Tears of Mokp’o” not just to cheer for the team but also to vent their discontent as people of Chŏlla. In this talk, I examine how a popular song can be utilized to represent a complex set of emotions and commitments shaped by politico-economic circumstances. I show that Haitai fans transformed a former resistance anthem into a baseball fight song, demonstrating their spirit of regional insubordination in the 1980s and 90s. [back to top]

Tadahiko IMADA (Hirosaki University)
Out of Deconstruction: Creating Alternative Music for Children through the Sound Education

In the nineteenth century Europe, music, as an autonomous being, was considered to be the work of composers who had specialized in the study of écriture (e.g., harmony; counterpoint and other forms). The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, however, attempted to deconstruct the concept of écriture and musical time that were self-evident in conventional European music, through the creative music making by children based on acoustic environment. From its origins in Plato and Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, European tonal music has been divided into two categories: music as a form of sound itself, and music described by language as rhetorical content. In the twentieth century, structuralism and post-structuralism have deconstructed the manner of rhetorical content that Western philosophy and aesthetics have relied on. Saussure, who argued that language is a signifier based on the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and a system of difference, and Derrida, who pointed out the surplus and ambiguity of language by further modifying Saussurean linguistics, played important roles in examining the relationship between language and music. Schafer, on the other hand, easily overcame and played with the small world of the écriture deconstructed by structuralism and post-structuralism, the flow of quantitative time that continues with intuition, meaning, and the present, through the concept of soundscape and sound education. The author considers this alternative practice as the creation of a new kind of music that has never been heard or played before. This paper attempts to contribute to the above discourse. [back to top]

Session 4a: Politics of Sound
Saturday, April 16, 15:00–17:00 (UTC+9)

Chair: HIRAMATSU Kozo (Kyoto University)

15:00–15:30 Susanne SACKL-SHARIF (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz),
“Skateboarding is not a crime”: On the Functions of Sounds in the Fight for Public
Spaces

15:30–16:00 Ruard ABSAROKA (University of Salzburg), “Listening the Other Way”: Sonic
Agnotology and the Politics and Practices of Differentiation through Musical
Unknowing

16:00–16:30 Rastko BULJANČEVIĆ (Academy of Arts of Novi Sad), Resisting the Sounds of
Otherness: Soundscape, Distortion, (Self-)Violence, and Narrativity in the Drama
Film Sound of Metal (2019)

16:30–17:00 Pedro J S VIEIRA DE OLIVEIRA (Independent Researcher), Politicizing Acoustic
Features: The Colonial Apparatus of Voice Biometry in the German Asylum System

Susanne SACKL-SHARIF (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz)
“Skateboarding is not a crime”: On the Functions of Sounds in the Fight for Public Spaces

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, inner-city public spaces in Graz, Austria, have been increasingly used by young skaters, as other opportunities for sporting activities were often not available. In some central places, this led to complaints from residents about noise pollution. As a reaction, the city of Graz introduced a ban on skaters doing tricks in public spaces in April 2021. This ban led to different protest actions. In addition to demonstrations and art actions in public spaces, much of the mobilization of allies took place on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Central components of the online protests were the sharing of self-made videos and songs. Furthermore, a local skateboarding club organized a protest song contest. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the question of what concrete functions sounds and music fulfill in the context of the skateboard trick ban. Based on social media and newspaper analyses, interviews with skateboarders, and observations of demonstrations, it is shown that sounds characterize the fight for public spaces on both sides. On the one side, the city government uses noise pollution to regulate access to public spaces. The analyses show that this is less about noise pollution in the narrower sense; rather sounds are used as an argument to transform public places into safe and clean places of consumption. On the other side, skateboarders use music to call for protests and express their anger. In this context, music fulfills, among others, the function of catharsis. [back to top]

Ruard ABSAROKA (University of Salzburg)
“Listening the Other Way”: Sonic Agnotology and the Politics and Practices of Differentiation through Musical Unknowing

Inattention to one auditory stimulus is often the prerequisite for (full) attention to another. But when we choose not to hear, how is this culturally entrained? When does ignoring crystallise into intentional ignorance? While epistemology is concerned with theories of knowledge, belief and rationality (how we know), what can be learned by studying the spread of ignorance and uncertainty? Agnotology, defined as the “cultural production of ignorance” (or why we do not know), is a term of relatively recent origination (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). Together with the “anthropology of ignorance” it opens up a burgeoning field of study and a process of scholarly revaluation that recognises not only the ways in which knowledge and ignorance are always co-constituting, but that a negative definition of ignorance in terms of lack, problem, or deficit completely fails to take into account how ignorance can be rational or strategic and is frequently a matter of necessity. But what can an agnotologic approach in Sound Studies contribute to the understanding of (the history of) listening? Drawing primarily on a case-study from China of “environmental ensemble listening”, this paper investigates enculturated practices of tuning-out and un-hearing. There are many theories of musical learning and much scholarly focus on the acquisition of musical skill(s), but far less attention is paid to barriers to such acquisition or the imperatives that militate towards musical ignoring, exclusions, genre-policing. How do connoisseurs of a genre restrict attentional bandwidth? And how do new-comers unlearn previously habituated listening practices? [back to top]

Rastko BULJANČEVIĆ (Academy of Arts of Novi Sad)
Resisting the Sounds of Otherness: Soundscape, Distortion, (Self-)Violence, and Narrativity in the Drama Film Sound of Metal (2019)

The human drama Sound of Metal consists of various musical references and background noises that empathically immerse the viewer in the world of the film. Since the overall auditory content plays a crucial role in representing and conceptualising the various human affects, repressed emotions and acoustic environment, the binary distinction between purely musical and sonic components is almost blurred. Moreover, all sounds, even the noise itself, can be perceived as a creative sensory distortion of the fictional cinematic reality. The main character of the film is Ruben (Riz Ahmed), the drummer of a metal band who struggles with hearing loss caused by chronically loud music or an unknown autoimmune disease. Since music is an integral part of his life, he tries to cope with this unexpected defect in different ways. Special attention is therefore paid to the narrative function of sound, including the perception of hybrid artificial sounds caused by the activation of cochlear implants. In other words, the protagonist processes a new palette of unwanted sounds that oscillates discordantly between pre-existing and original songs, musical echoes, noise and terrifying silence. The aim of this presentation is to analyse the rich timbral, narrative, perceptual, philosophical, psychological and conceptual potential of a multilayered cinematic soundscape. In contrast to the acoustic effects of excessively loud metal music, exposure to these “metallic” sounds results in Ruben’s auditory hypersensitivity and acoustic trauma, as the medical device produces distorted, unpleasant and even physically painful sounds that signify a fractured and emanating otherness. [back to top]

Pedro J S VIEIRA DE OLIVEIRA (Independent Researcher)
Politicizing Acoustic Features: The Colonial Apparatus of Voice Biometry in the German Asylum System

Since April 2017, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) has been actively using a so-called “dialect recognition system” (sometimes referred to as “accent recognition” or “voice biometry”), a proprietary software which uses machine listening models to determine the probable accents or dialects spoken by an undocumented asylum applicant. While dialect analysis is not new to the migration industry, Germany is as of this writing the only country to make use of machine listening to speed up the processing of asylum applications. While the software itself is not accessible to the public, an analysis of the information disclosed by the BAMF in Freedom of Information requests may reveal enough clues as to how it arrives at the answers it seeks to find. In this paper, I offer a decolonizing analysis of a specific part of the machine listening model used by the BAMF to argue that by conflating (and confusing) timbre with accent, the German migration system reinforces and reinstates colonial understandings of the relationships between voice, body, language, origin, and ultimately citizenship, thus instrumentalizing listening (human and machinic) to justify and enforce deportation. [back to top]

Session 4b: Gender, Technology, and Voice
Saturday, April 16, 15:00–16:30 (UTC+9)

Chair: Sang Wook YI (Hanyang University)

15:00–15:30 Veronika MUCHITSCH (Södertörn University), “Bubblegrunge” and Formations of
Gendered Sound in Spotify’s Genre Practices

15:30–16:00 Maximilian HABERER (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf), Streaming against the
Stream: Evading and Subverting the Power of Music Streaming Platforms

16:00–16:30 Christopher ZYSIK (Paderborn University), The Voice of Cuteness: Constructing
Gender Segregation in Japanese Idol Music

Veronika MUCHITSCH (Södertörn University)
“Bubblegrunge” and Formations of Gendered Sound in Spotify’s Genre Practices

When Spotify users received their individualized 2021 year-end reports, many found the elusive genre “bubblegrunge” among their most popular genres. Causing confusion, the label was widely discussed on social media: while most users discussed the tag’s elusive nature or questioned its origins, some joked about its gendered implications. As one user suggested in a Twitter post, the tag appeared to simply mean “rock with female vocals.” This anecdote illustrates how the ways that sound becomes meaningful, including in terms of gender, are continuously mediated by genre in contemporary popular music culture, and points to the increasing role of music recommendation systems like Spotify in the formation of these patterns of meaning. Initial analyses of genre and identity in music streaming suggest that its technological practices and discursive formations (Johnson 2020) perpetuate the mutual, yet complex mediation of musical and social identity formations (Born 2011) that has historically reinforced societal patterns of identity-based marginalization (Brackett 2005). This research forcefully challenges the popular notion that genre’s importance as a structuring factor in twenty-first-century popular music is waning. In this paper, I develop this work toward a critical examination of the mediation of gendered sound through genre, as performed by Spotify’s genre tag “bubblegrunge.” Mobilising Brock’s (2018) model of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I integrate analyses of discursive formations, sonic characteristics, and statistical representation of gender surrounding “bubblegrunge” to examine how genre mediates the gendered politics of sound, and I critically consider Spotify’s “platform power” (Prey 2020) in its formation. [back to top]

Maximilian HABERER (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Streaming against the Stream: Evading and Subverting the Power of Music Streaming Platforms

In her much-discussed book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff diagnoses the transformation of personal data into a valuable commodity of a new market form focused on algorithmic recommendation, whose indirect goal is ultimately to penetrate intimate spaces and automate behavior. Music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and others, which are also active as eager data traders, can be understood as prototypical actors of this “surveillance capitalism,” eavesdropping on their users while streaming music. For streaming platforms, the ideal listener reveals as much as possible about his or her own (supposed) personality, gender, class, etc., but above all about the immediate listening context. In order to obtain as much meaningful data as possible, listening to music is therefore staged by streaming providers as a ubiquitous, subjectivizing everyday practice. But even though the growing market power of streaming platforms over music production, industry and consumption seems overwhelming, resistance and delinquency are stirring. Bots listen instead of ears, accounts are shared and locations are technically obscured. Rather than portraying once more the ever increasing influence of streaming platforms on music culture, the paper aims to invert the perspective, searching for the diverse everyday subversions of the system, the evasions of power, in short: it focuses on what Michel de Certeau calls “tactics” and explores the questions of when, where and how music is not heard (and produced) via (and for) streaming services in the way ideally portrayed by the platforms. [back to top]

Christopher ZYSIK (Paderborn University)
The Voice of Cuteness: Constructing Gender Segregation in Japanese Idol Music

Gender segregation plays a crucial role in creating and manifesting gender inequality and gender stereotypes in Japan. These stereotypes lead to fixed gender roles, various forms of gender and sexual harassment and overall unequal treatment of women in the everyday life, employment, and work (see Nemoto 2016). Cultural products are no exception. Their function, not as mere representation, but as co-constructing social reality, raises the question how they manifest gender segregation. In Japan, idol music and its extraordinary success in the last fifteen years has a big impact on the experiences of gender. In this music genre, I argue, the voice of cuteness (jap.: kawaii) is a fundamental tool to separate female idols from male idols. By using a soft, nasal, baby-like sound, female idols evoke notions of powerlessness, innocence, and charm. Therefore, constructing and promoting a stereotypical image of cute femininity tied to the female voice and body for society in general. Based on Sianne Ngai’s (2012) and Simon May’s (2019) argumentation, these seemingly unthreatening and submissive notions represent only one aspect in the continuous spectrum of Cute. Ranging from Sweet to Uncanny Cute, its complexity contradicts stereotypical usages. While most of the research on cuteness and kawaii focuses on the visual aspects, I will turn my focus to the sonic dimension. In this presentation, I explore how links between sonic aesthetics and social stereotypes are constructed and how they manifest “sonic stereotypes,” but also how they are deconstructed in the very same aesthetic category. [back to top]

Roundtable: Asian Sound Cultures
Friday, April 15, 14:00–16:00 (UTC+9)

Moderator: Hee Seng KYE (Hanyang University)

Panel: Vebhuti DUGGAL (Ambedkar University Delhi), Philip FLAVIN (Kansai Gaidai University), Jenny HALL (Monash University), Iris HAUKAMP (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), Christin HOENE (Maastricht University), Jina Eleanor KIM (University of Oregon), Martyn David SMITH (University of Sheffield), Kornphanat TUNGKEUNKUNT (Thammasat University), Noah VIERNES (Akita International University), Ka Lee WONG (University of Southern California)

This roundtable discussion is based on the forthcoming edited collection Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (eds. Haukamp, Hoene, Smith; Routledge, 2022). This volume challenges us to rethink and reassemble important categories in sound studies. The countries covered include China, South Korea, Hong Kong, India, and Thailand, as well as Japan, and the book examines the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technologies across Asia. The volume thus adds to a growing body of work that challenges western universalism and contributes to the expansion of the cartography of global modernity in sound studies. The chapters tackle the issues of sound as music, modernity as development, and Empire as ‘western/northern regimes’ of knowledge, mixing historical perspectives with ethnography, literary studies, film studies, technology, language, and music. As a whole, this volume recovers sound as central to the experience of modernity and everyday life in Asia. The book also shows that the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia can be mobilised to provide alternative horizons and voices for the field of sound studies. These are some of the points that will be addressed at this roundtable discussion. [back to top]