About

Counter-Production: Noise as Critical Research in Sound Studies

A UCHRI Multi-Campus Graduate Student Working Group

[Counter-Production_Noise as Critical Research PDF]

ABSTRACT

Despite pockets of Sound Studies inquiry on particular UC campuses, there are no formalized or funded conversations across the UC system. To fill this void, we propose a UCHRI graduate student working group for the academic year 2017-18, with the hope that our model for interdisciplinary research continues as an enduring interest between the UC campuses, even beyond the year of the working group. This group will set out to critically engage the field of Sound Studies, questioning hierarchies of knowledge production and established patterns of cultural meaning. To do so, the group will take up the negative powers of noise, arguing that its disruptive, illegible and unintelligible attributes produce a critical lens for understanding sound’s interaction with the material, the literary and the cultural. The working group will meet three times over the course of the year, with the third meeting culminating in a conference for the presentation of original research, as well as the launch of an online audio publication. After considering over thirty statements of interest in the working group, we have commitments  from fifteen graduate students representing six UC campuses: UCLA, UCR, UCSB, UCD, UCB, and UCSC. These students hail from a variety of disciplines, including Cognitive Psychology, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English Literature, Ethnomusicology, Film and Media, Music, Music Composition, Musicology, and the History of Consciousness.

Problem Statement:

Since the 1970s, Sound Studies has exploded as an interdisciplinary field of research across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. As John Jordan (UCSC) has noted, the field developed from the work of thinkers like R. Murray Schafer, who operated within more traditional research areas, including musicology, anthropology, urban planning and the history of sound recording technologies (2). Since that time, numerous scholars have engaged this emergent discipline through critical frameworks exploring race, class and gender. As Kara Keeling and Josh Kun (USC) suggest in their 2012 anthology “Sound Clash,” this developing interest in the field of Sound Studies exists alongside a larger project in the humanities “to dismantle hierarchies of knowledge production and critical thought,” especially among scholars working in cultural studies, feminism, queer studies, and critical race and ethnic studies (447). Our goal in the working group is to not only cultivate an interdisciplinary understanding of the field of Sound Studies, but to actively contribute to the development of critical research in sound through frameworks that unsettle dominant discourses inside it.

To that end we are taking up the ubiquitous sonic trope of noise, reclaiming its counter-productive character, and asking how its interference with normative reception can be a tactic for critique. We will look at how noise acts to “disrupt” material conditions, to make “illigible” literary attempts at audiation, and ultimately make “unintelligible” culture’s attempts to capture individuals and communities of resistance. The range of curiosities and interests expressed by the group members include such questions as:

  • What is the role of sound and silence in torture?
  • How does exposure to noise pollution correlate with race and class?
  • Why talk about sound, music, and silence in literature?
  • How do Indigenous musicking and sounding practices incorporate non-human animals and generate multiple acoustic ontologies?
  • What qualities of speech produce affective connection, and what qualities incite conflict?
  • How is music used to produce “authentic” film and televisual narrative about urban communities?
  • What is the relationship between trauma and sonic memory?
  • How do poets use sound to convey the lived experience of oppression?
  • Why is group singing an effective tool of survival?
  • How do sound-art installations challenge ocularcentric claims in philosophy?
  • What are the relationships between listening, the materiality of sonic experience and notions of disabled ways of being?
  • Why are some silences so awkward?

George Lipsitz (UCSB) reminds us that “theoretical expertise alone” is insufficient for our understanding of counter-hegemonic aurality – these sounds “are to be found within the concrete contests of everyday life” (114). These contests are the competing signals that produce the noise of politics, and as Roshanak Kheshti (UCSD) tells us, this noise is “not only a vehicle in the communication of difference…but also contributes to the production of difference by materializing bodies in the imaginary of the listener” (7). This study group will inevitably look at how subjects are produced by sound, how sound is an index of that process, and what culturally specific forms of aurality/orality find their voicing through media to produce counter-public spheres, what Dolores Ines Casillas (UCSB) calls in reference to radio “air communities” (8).

As graduate students within the UC system we are uniquely positioned to draw upon the invaluable scholarship already being produced across the UC campuses, as demonstrated by much of the cited work above. As of now, the UC campuses offer only a few isolated projects as a site for this interdisciplinary, cross-campus work (including the nascent Sound Initiative at UC Berkeley and isolated events at the Center for Interdisciplinary Music at UC Santa Barbara).  In the short term, our working group seeks to connect these efforts by bringing students from across the UC campuses into conversation with each other, various campus communities and the general public.  We hope that graduate students will make meaningful connections with other students and faculty across the UC campuses, establishing peer mentors and potential faculty dissertation readers.  In the long term, we aim to provide a model for interdisciplinary research that continues beyond the year of the working group and thus provides a resource, through archived material or continual meetings, for Sound Studies research between the UC campuses.

Works Cited:

  • Dolores Ines Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: US Spanish Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: NYU Press, 2014).
  • John O. Jordan, “Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop”, E-rea [online], 13.2, 2016.
  • Kara Keeling and Josh Kun (eds), Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012).
  • Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: NYU Press, 2015).
  • George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Our Plan

The meetings throughout the year will be scaffolded to continually widen the aperture of the working group’s focus. Each day will feature a short discussion of the group’s goals and main lines of questioning, short presentations and discussion on group readings, a public lecture and discussion with an invited speaker, and a short planning discussion for the next meeting.

Our first meeting, Disruptive: Noise as/is Matter/ial,  will focus on the relationship between Sound and different conceptions of the Material, and may include discussion on such topics as: historical, feminist, and new materialisms;  architecture and the production of space; the history of sound technology; contemporary artistic production in relation to instrument making; multi-species sound and communication; sonic embodiment and its biological, neurological, affective and psychological effects.

Our second meeting, Illegible: Literary Audiation, will put a particular focus on Sound and its relationship to Literature: sound as a method of representing racialized, classed or gendered identity and historical trauma; as a medium of literary distribution; and as a mode of representation and performance for poets.

Our final meeting, Unintelligible: Sound Studies Against Capture, will manifest as a conference focusing on original research by members of the working group as well as an invited keynote speaker. Framing this gathering broadly as addressing Sound and Culture, we are inviting not only a consideration of the previous topics, but an expanded questioning of social, political and cultural life as expressed through the study of sound: the ways identity (race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity) are heard, produced or contested by sound; how the aural challenges western ocularcentrism; composition and the sonic production of space; silence and the carceral.

We will use this third meeting as an opportunity to record material for an audio-publication, which will appear online and possibly in physical form. This audio-publication will include recordings from the conference, audio research, archival material, poetry readings and original compositions.

These meetings will take place across three University of California campuses and will feature students from six different schools and ten different disciplines. Though students from UCSC are more highly represented, they offer invaluable diversity of discipline and life experience. Between meetings, graduate students will read 4-6 articles, as well as listen to audio materials, all relating to the upcoming topic. Students will also be asked to prepare summaries, position papers, or works of original content to pre-distribute and discuss during the day-long meeting. The meetings will serve as a means for students to engage with their peers, as well as invited faculty, from across the state, thus creating a network of researchers across the UC system. This work will also be a resource for the general public, with our first two lunchtime lectures and the entirety of our third gathering being open to the public, as well as through the online audio-publication that will result.