Sound Studies, Difference, and Global Concept History

Sykes, Jim

doi:10.1215/9781478002192-013

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…So the challenge posed to MIR by non-Western musics is not just to get the rhythmic or timbral analysis right, or to take the cues about musical difference from such musics and not impose inappropriate musical values, qualities and systems on them. It is also to recognize that all musics -and most spectacularly those non-Western musics that have as yet resisted incorporation into the global archives of digitized recorded music -have an ontology, that those ontologies are plural and often deeply social as well as religious or cosmological (Bohlman, 1999;Born, 2013;Sykes, 2019), and that they may be antithetical to, or profoundly different from, the universalised music ontologies assumed by MIR and companion disciplines. This poses ethical and political tests akin to those posed by discourses of sustainability -but here, tests of musical and cultural sustainability.…”

Section: Mir and Musical Diversity: Whose Music Which Music?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

Born

2020

Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval

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Challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the 20 th ISMIR conference, asks how MIR can refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity. It is written by an outsider, yet one who, as a music anthropologist, is intensely concerned with MIR and its influence. The focus is on elaborating auto-critiques that have emerged within the MIR community: social, cultural, epistemological and ethical matters to do with the diversity of the profession, of the music with which MIR engages, and of the kinds of knowledge produced. One theme is interdisciplinarity: how MIR would gain from closer dialogues with contemporary musicology, music anthropology and sociology. The article also considers how the 'refresh' might address MIR's pursuit of research oriented to technological innovation, often linked to the drive for economic growth; concerns about sustainable economies, it argues, suggest the need for other values to guide future science and engineering. In this light, the article asks what computational music genre recognition or recommendation would look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise imaginative self-or group development, pursuing not a logic of 'similarity' but diversity, or took human musical flourishing as their goals. The article closes by suggesting that the time is ripe in MIR for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen.

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Section: Mir and Musical Diversity: Whose Music Which Music?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

Born

2020

Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval

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“…In other words, by assuming a secular epistemology characteristic of music theory, this work sequesters musical aesthetics from a ritual function. In doing so, ethnomusicology's collective exploration of Southeast Asian heterophonies becomes "a formation of the secular that produces the secular" (Sykes 2019, p. 211, referring to Asad 2003 by naturalizing the separation of aesthetics and function through assumptions inherent to the analysis. To be clear, I am not saying that this work is necessarily historicist, as music theory often assumes ahistorical guises.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular Songs, Melodies from the Dead: Moving beyond Historicism with the Buddhist Ethics and Aesthetics of Pin Peat and Cambodian Hip Hop

Dyer

2020

Religions

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This article illustrates how the aesthetics of two types of Cambodian music—pin peat and Cambodian hip hop—enact Cambodian–Buddhist ethics and function as ritual practices through musicians’ recollections of deceased teachers’ musical legacies. Noting how prevalent historicist and secular epistemologies isolate Cambodian and, more broadly, Southeast Asian musical aesthetics from their ethical and ritual functions, I propose that analyses focusing on Buddhist ethics more closely translate the moral, religious, and ontological aspects inherent in playing and listening to Cambodian music. I detail how Cambodian musicians’ widespread practices of quoting deceased teachers’ variations, repurposing old musical styles, and reiterating the melodies and rhythms played by artistic ancestors have the potential to function as Buddhist rituals, whether those aesthetic and stylistic features surface in pin peat songs or in hip hop. Those aesthetic practices entail a modality of being historical that partially connects with but exceeds historicism’s approach to Buddhism, temporality, and history by enacting relations of mutual care that bring the living and dead to be ontologically coeval. Such relational practices bring me to conclude with a brief discussion rethinking what post-genocide remembrance sounds like and feels like.

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“…Yet, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, from which such research draws, has been consistently critiqued for its uncritically white and masculine epistemological emphasis (Nyong'o, 2014;Pinto, 2016;Vazquez, 2013). Additionally, it is troubled by its concomitant reification of sound technology (Steingo, 2019), and a generalisation of findings from European societal and cultural frames (Silverstein, 2019;J. Sykes, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What could be Feminist about Sound Studies?’: (in)Audibility in Young Children’s Soundwalking

Shannon

2019

JPP

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Sound methods, including soundwalking, are increasingly being used across the humanities and social sciences. Yet, while scholars are drawn to such methods for their potential to disrupt the ocular-centrism of Euro-Western knowledge frames, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies (from which such research draws) has been consistently critiqued for its uncritically white and masculinist epistemological emphasis. In this short essay, I draw together examples of four soundwalking methods: soundwalks, listening walks, phonographic walks, and audio walks. I explicate each, thinking with examples from my ongoing in-school doctoral research project, to suggest that a compositional attention to voice, music, and inaudibility might make audible those populations whose oppression is enacted through their very inaudibility. This essay has implications for educators and walking scholars, as well as for the wider field of sound studies.

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Sound Studies, Difference, and Global Concept History

Cited by 3 publications

References 26 publications

Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

Popular Songs, Melodies from the Dead: Moving beyond Historicism with the Buddhist Ethics and Aesthetics of Pin Peat and Cambodian Hip Hop

‘What could be Feminist about Sound Studies?’: (in)Audibility in Young Children’s Soundwalking

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