Von: Leigh Landy via cec conference
Datum: Fri, 2 Sep 2016
Betreff: [cec-c] Call for papers – Organised Sound issue 23/2 ‚New
Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds
Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology
Call for submissions
Volume 23, Number 2
Issue thematic title – New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds
Date of publication: August 2018
Submission deadline: 15 September 2017
Issue co-ordinators: Erika Honisch
and Margaret Schedel margaret.schedel@stonybrook.edu>
Stony Brook University
Evidence for the ‘sonic turn’ in and beyond the humanities is
everywhere: in the calls for papers of recent interdisciplinary
conferences, in the popularity of sound-oriented blogs, in the formation
of sound studies interest groups in academic professional societies, in
the collaborations of electroacoustic composers with social scientists,
and, not least, in the purview of /Organised Sound /itself. It is less
evident—given the general emphasis in sound studies on contemporary
sonic cultures and practices—that a significant line of inquiry focuses
on the richly sonic past. Studies exemplifying this historicist impulse
draw attention to the acoustic properties of ancient and early modern
spaces, and those of more recent built environments (Blesser and Salter,
2007; Fisher, 2014); they search archival documents for the sounds of
colonial encounter (Rath 2005) and the hubbub of England in the
Victorian period and earlier (Picker 2003; Cockayne, 2007); they find
traces of the noisy mediaeval city in manuscript illuminations (Dillon
2012); they document sound and its silencing to trace shifting urban
identities and values (Bjisterveld 2008; Thompson, 2002); they
investigate the properties of instruments and technologies, from
monochords to metronomes, developed to chart interval space and measure
musical time (Grant, 2014); they consider the collision of early
recording technology with traditional Western musical aesthetics
(Rehding, 2005). Collaborative digital projects recreate past sound
worlds, embedding reconstructed sounds in 3D virtual space, as in Mylène
Pardoen’s /The Sounds of Eighteenth-Century Paris
news.cnrs.fr/articles/sound-18th-century-paris , or situating
records (both aural and textual) of sound in specific locations, as with
the ever-expanding London Sound Survey.
www.soundsurvey.org.uk/index.php/survey/historical/
The interest in timbre, changing technologies, and acoustics that
animates these projects also drives the work of practitioners and
historians of electroacoustic music. Indeed, the vocabulary and
methodologies developed by electroacoustic musicians to build a sonic
lexicon, research the sounds of the past, and contextualise the impact
of technology on sonic creativity are ideally suited to historically
oriented sound studies.
The purpose of this themed issue of Organised Sound is to explore the
many points of resonance between the questions raised by electroacoustic
specialists and those taken up by scholars who work on the sounds of the
pre-electric past. How can we build bridges between these two exciting
fields? With this in mind, for the ‘New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds issue,
we invite contributions that experiment with the possibilities of
applying the insights afforded by electroacoustic technologies,
practices and vocabularies to sounds and spaces before the widespread
adoption of electric sound in North America and Europe, roughly 1925. By
its very etymology ‘electroacoustic’ implicates the electric; so while
we could have simply proposed a crossover issue between sound studies
and electroacoustic music, we have chosen instead to be deliberately
provocative to encourage our authors and readers to expand their
conception of the traditional scope of Organised Sound. We are
interested in providing a forum for the projection of electroacoustic
music studies to other pre-electric objects and, conversely, testing out
methodologies as well as the relevance/applicability of historical
knowledge to the current and future initiatives falling squarely within
the journal’s subject domain, electroacoustic music studies.
More specifically, we wish to probe how electroacoustic language might
be fruitfully used to discuss technologies, compositions, and listening
practices before the advent of recording and electronically generated
sound. What kinds of sounds emerge when we examine textual documents or
historical musical instruments using a vocabulary of timbre informed by
electroacoustic music? What do the re-creative possibilities of
electroacoustic technology tell us about the obsolete or imaginary
musical instruments described in music theory treatises (Athanasius
Kircher, Musurgia Universalis,1650); the utopian sound-houses described
by Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis,1624); the ‘invisible music’
channelled into the palace of Christian IV of Denmark (Spohr, 2012); the
acoustic properties of the cavernous Salle des Machines in Berlioz’s
Paris? And on the other hand, how do pre-electric practices and
technologies continue to inform current electroacoustic practices? Taken
together, such questions invite a rethinking of the relationship between
past and present conceptions of timbre, space, and sonic ecology, and
the history of sound-based listening.
Contributors might take up the following questions:
What is an electroacoustic vocabulary for the pre-electric sonic past?
What can we learn if we apply new electroacoustic methodologies to
examine familiar historical objects (musical texts, musical
instruments, resonant spaces)?
* How are current electroacoustic practices shaped and informed by
pre-electric musical technologies?
* How are current electroacoustic technologies used in the study of
pre-electric music?
Which electroacoustic technologies can be deployed to answer
questions about the acoustic properties of colonial village greens,
of Gothic cathedrals, of Baroque theatres, of the factories and
mills of the Industrial Revolution?
* What do we learn when electroacoustic practitioners and historians
take up questions that drive sound studies research (for example,
the interest on aural cultures and listening communities) to shed
light on the history and priorities of electroacoustic music?**
* and….?
As always, submissions related to the theme are encouraged; however,
those that fall outside the scope of this theme are also welcome.
Articles which compare pre-electric and post-electric sound-worlds and
sonic practices are encouraged but in order to be considered ‘on theme’
a substantial portion of the text must address the period before 1925.
We invite contributions from all disciplines, but particularly from
electroacoustic music studies, history, sound studies, musicology and
ethnomusicology, music theory, and history of science.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 September 2017
SUBMISSION FORMAT:
Notes for Contributors and further details can be obtained from the
inside back cover of published issues of Organised Sound or at the
following url:
journals.cambridge.org/action/displayMoreInfo?jid=OSO&type=ifc(and
download the pdf)
Properly formatted email submissions and general queries should be sent
to: os@dmu.ac.uk, not to the guest editors.
Hard copy of articles and images and other material (e.g., sound and
audio-visual files, etc. – normally max. 15’ sound files or 8’ movie
files), both only when requested, should be submitted to:
Prof. Leigh Landy
Organised Sound
Clephan Building
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH, UK.
Editor: Leigh Landy
Associate Editors: Ross Kirk and Richard Orton†
Regional Editors: Ricardo Dal Farra, Jøran Rudi, Margaret Schedel, Barry
Truax, Ian Whalley, David Worrall, Lonce Wyse
International Editorial Board: Marc Battier, Manuella Blackburn, Joel
Chadabe, Alessandro Cipriani, Simon Emmerson, Kenneth Fields, Rajmil
Fischman, Eduardo Miranda, Rosemary Mountain, Tony Myatt, Jean-Claude
Risset, Mary Simoni, Martin Supper, Daniel Teruggi
References:
Bjisterveld, K.2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public
Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century/. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Blesser, B. and L.-R. Salter. 2007. Spaces speak, are you listening?
Experiencing aural architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Cockayne, E. 2007. Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dillon, E. 2012.The Sense of Sound: /Musical Meaning in France,
1260–1330. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, A. 2014.Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of
Counter-Reformation Bavaria. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Grant, R. 2014.Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era.
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Picker, J. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Rath, R. C. 2005. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Rehding, A. 2005. ‘Wax Cylinder Revolutions’. Musical Quarterly 88
(2005): 123–160.
Spohr, A. 2012. ‘This Charming Invention Created by the King’ –
Christian IV and His Invisible Music. Danish Yearbook of Musicology
39: 13-33.
Thompson, E. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics
and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press.