In this post for Modernism/modernity, I reflect on how how modernist scholarship can respond to the present.

Source: Modernism Ungoverned

The Politics of the Musical Situation: A Response to Marina Rosenfeld

Author and researcher Julie Beth Napolin presents here responses to sound artist Marina Rosenfeld from a discussion at The New School in New York City. Including material from a Bomb magazine interview with Rosenfeld, the political terrains of listening and power intersect acoustic art making.

continent Issue 5.3 / 2016 “Acoustic Infrastructures“

I’m pleased to participate in “Techniques of the Listener,” convened by the Yale Sound Studies Working Group. We hope to write a collective essay on the proceedings.

About Techniques of the Listener

“Techniques of the Listener” is a two day working group on audile techniques, supported by a Humanity/Humanities grant from Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.

Our goal is to collectively examine, develop, and refine the notion of “audile techniques” from both practical and theoretical angles. The sessions are not public; rather they are designed to maximize conversation, exchange, and collective thinking.

We hope to approach the idea of audile technique both intensively and extensively. Intensively, we want to look at particular instances. By ranging across the disciplines, we hope to see how different cultural-historical situations are articulated and altered through the application of audile techniques. Each participant will present a short narrative of an audile technique, contemporary or historical, in hopes of building a small “sample set” of cases. By considering these cases we aim to study audile techniques both individually and comparatively. We hope to broaden and refine our understanding of what kinds of practices should be included under the heading of an audile technique.

Extensively, we seek to better understand the nature of audile techniques generally. Can we make inroads on developing a theory of audile techniques? Are current theories of audile techniques sufficient for illuminating and generalizing over individual cases? How do techniques, at once, organize and respond to the relays, successions, and recursive loops of auditory aspects of human experience?  Bringing the two approaches together, we seek to clarify the structure and nature of technique, while also remaining sensitive to the specific ways audile techniques are integrated with audio technologies and other sensory techniques.

After our two day meeting, we will make public the outcome and implications of the conversations.

Conveners:

J.D. Connor (Yale, Art History and Film Studies)
Ben Glaser (Yale, English)
Brian Kane (Yale, Music)

Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought: Seminar with Marina Rosenfeld

Respondent, Julie Beth Napolin

Available January 1, 2016

The Audiophonic Form of As I Lay Dying (click to download the chapter as a PDF)

In this roundtable, we took up Keith + Mendi Obadike’s sound installation, “Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]” (2015). The 12-hour work archives the sounds of “Sonny’s Blues,” also activating relations between sound, literary voice, and city space. We discussed Baldwin and the politics of listening, past, present, and future. With Mendi Obadike and Rich Blint.

The Eldritch Voice: H. P. Lovecraft’s Weird Phonography.