Sound Unseen

Kane, Brian

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199347841.001.0001

Cited by 228 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Rather, a persistent anxiety over the absent source of an autonomous sound, and a lack of information within an auditory effect that may accurately identify its cause, carves out a space in which a "surplus-meaning" can arise. 47 This idea has significant ramifications for an understanding of mechanisms by which sonic elongation operates: "one central, replicated feature of acousmatic listening appears to be that under-determination of the sonic source encourages imaginative supplementation". 48 To substantiate his argument, Kane refers to Steven Connor's notion of the vocalic body, in which "a surrogate or secondary body" manifests as "a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice"; Kane appropriates this taxonomy to configure "a sonic body": "Acousmatic sounds encourage the imaginative projection of a sonic body".…”

Section: Sound Re-seenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film

Rogers¹

2020

JCMS

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This paper investigates documentary films in which real-world sound captured from the location shoot has been treated more creatively than the captured image; in particular, instances when real-world noises pass freely between sound and musical composition. I call this process the sonic elongation from sound to music; a blurring that allows the soundtrack to keep one foot in the image, thus allowing the film to retain a loose grip on the traditional nonfiction aesthetic. With reference to several recent documentary feature films, I argue that such moments rely on a confusion between hearing and listening. PaperImaginative sound design that stretches into musical texture can press at the fragile border between the fantasies of fiction film and documentary's fraught engagement with real-world footage. In narrative fiction film, the creative blurring of sound and music can suggest fictional worlds and question our reading of an image; it can form complicated and

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Section: Sound Re-seenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film

Rogers¹

2020

JCMS

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“…Return to text 51. See Kane 2014 andChion 1994 for discussions of acousmatic (heard, but unseen) sound sources and the history of their associations with supernatural qualities, especially in film sound/music.…”

Section: Taking Stock Of Thingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Musical Meaning? Theorizing Music as Performative Utterance

Chung

2019

MTO

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In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.

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“…Her mix eschews soundscape's paradigms of verisimilitude and instead points back at the facticity of its transmission (not its recording) for a dense, holographic interleave of social geometries and conjugations conjured by the project's many different notions of long-distance, as this essay's final vignette will demonstrate. 41 Yet, the 'almost nothing' that hisses behind this writing is no closer to Presque Rien than to projects that resound 'high-tech' , long-distance desires more explicitly. Lingering on tape, Alvin Lucier's North American Time Capsule (1967) 42 proffers the voices of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus made 'alien' , in and as the gurgling chatter, robotic irruptions, and beam-like tones of a vocoder in glitched-out ecstasy, hardware that frayed a path for compression, that political economic 'recipe for fitting more calls on the line' .…”

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confidence: 97%

Telematic Tape: Notes on Maryanne Amacher'sCity-Links(1967–1980)

Cimini¹

2017

Twentieth-Century Music

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Reel-to-reel recordings and 15 kilocycle telelinks converge in Maryanne Amacher's telematic installation series City-Links (1967-81). As long-duration recordings of urban sites, City-Links queries the musicality of ambient sound on tape, a question of critical importance to many composers of the period. But as expressly telematic tape, City-Links embeds these recordings within a transforming US telecommunications industry where expanded long-distance dialing relied on the high-tech labour and gendered discipline of telephone operators, enrolling tapes' ambient sounding in broader questions about the technological mediation of gender, listening and long-distance embodiment during City-Links late 1960s and 1970s span. An extended reconstruction of one City-Links's tape's tactile qualities interprets this complex interimplication as a kind of telematic 'weave', with a spatiotemporal warp shuttling between the weft of environmental sounds and their technical traces.

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Sound Unseen

Cited by 228 publications

References 0 publications

Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film

Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film

What is Musical Meaning? Theorizing Music as Performative Utterance

Telematic Tape: Notes on Maryanne Amacher'sCity-Links(1967–1980)

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