Month: May 2025

• This weeks lecture we explored how indigenous cosmologies value listening in such a way of kinship
• In many indigenous communities, listing isn’t just about what you hear, but a deeper relationship with the land, community and the spiritual world
• Listening become a different act when talking about indigenous tribes

Songlines

• Songlines where a type of song used boy many aboriginal people of Australia
• They where originally used to navigate land, and pass on knowledge of the food
• This is a great example of how song and place are woven into one to show that listening can be a form of knowledge moving through the world

• We also looked at the long history of theft in the form colonisation
• This makes it very important to approach the study of indigenous songs and oral cultures with care and responsibility
• In recent times there’s been a growing recognition of Indigenous perspectives across many fields, including art, music, and academia. This renewed interest is helping to expand our collective understanding of what listening can be

I am interested in…

What is your topic?
Which areas of research does it involve?

… in order to find out…

What question/s are you trying to answer?

… to help my reader understand…

What do you hope to discover in the process? What might others learn from your research?

• I have thought about what I want to focus my question
• I think I want to focus on a sound culture
• there are many examples I could go into but I like the look of Times Square

Decolonisation

What does decolonisation mean/entail?

Decolonisation means undoing the effects of colonialism—when powerful countries took control of other lands, people, and cultures.

When we are talking about reclaiming after decolonisation it mean to take back what was lost from colonisation

Ontology – I the study of what is real or what exists. What is real? What kind of things exist

Epistemology – The study of knowledge, how we know things to be the truth. How do we know something is true? Who’s knowledge is valid

Cosmology – Is the study of the universe, its spiritual, cultural and mythological

EASTMAN INVOCATIONS by George E Lewis

• This performance is a great example of reclaiming erased histories
• George E Lewis made this to challenge the western classic tradition by changing the tone, structure and form
• He also uses sound as means of healing of colonisation

Decolonising DAW’s

• We talked about how DAW styles are Westernised by notes, scale and using classic musical notes and tones
• There are some examples that I played around with in which to change the way or take back more less westernised ways of making music digitally

Decolonising listening

“I used an AI system that performed what is called ‘style transfer’—it changes styles of music, morphing from one style to another. I used Antonio Zepeda’s ‘Templo Mayor’ album […] as an audio source. This was already an experimental music album. I wanted to hear what the AI system would do with these pre-hispanic sounds morphed with my own corpus of music from the past five years, not in a perspective of purity, but with the idea of creating a lineage, a continuum. The traces of pre-hispanic instruments had been lost through time, through the process of colonization. So it’s an effort to create a bridge between.”

Decolonising listening refers to the reforming of how we listen to certain music.

Why decolonising is important

• Decolonizing is important because it creates a more fair and inclusive modern world. It challenges the history and questions the impact that colonisation had on global culture. Restoring the lost voices of many indigenous, black and non-western cultures, decolonising bring the power back to that list knowledge of history, education and art.

• We talked about the content of what we would be looking at throughout thus unit
• Various sound art cultures and their historical, geographical and socio cultural context
• He talked about how it was important to raise the question of whether our not it has issues
• The main focus is to look at the problems and think critcally
• Considering contemporary sonic practice from a global perspective requires attention to the specificities of the local and to marginalised voices

Assignment brief

1. 1,500 word written essay on one of the following indicative topics. The specifics of these and case studies will be shared with you via Moodle as the Unit begins.A) Within a specific cultural context, evaluate the relationships between sound art, identity and vernacular forms of sound practice.B) A sensory ethnography of a gig / exhibition / concert / online sonic experience.C) A critical contextualisation and analysis of a sonic case study of your choosing.D) An analysis of an artefact which reflects on sound creation, distribution and consumption in a world of ubiquitous digital media.
2. Research Blog Export based on your sound arts interests and the independent learning tasks of this unit as well as the weekly Sound Arts Lecture Series (minimum 6 entries). These should engage with critical thinking and contextual research. Remember to make your blog rich with media (photographs, scans, sounds, sketches etc). You must include a link to your blog within the PDF file that you submit for assessment.

• We talked about what we are expected to do throughout the unit. And slo what is required of us in the blogs
• I like the work that was mentioned in this first initial session
• He goes into evaluating literature and its importance so that we are able engage with the media we receive

What does critical thinking involve?

Sound

• What is its texture?
• How does it develop over time?
• How loud/dense is it?

Materials

• What sounds is it made of?
• What media does it use?
• How can it be listened to?

Creation

• Who made it?
• Who else is involved?
• How was it made?
• What processes were involved?
• How have these influenced the outcome?

What does it mean when this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants? 

Some examples:

Jogja Noise Bombing, Jogyakarta

• The cultural significance is the reclaiming of public space through sound
• Its also anti-established DIY aspect of it makes it brilliant!
• It’s a great use of free will

Nusasonic Jogyakarta, Club Transmediale

• This is significant because its showing the celebration of a different type of reimagining the club scene
• Bringing Southeast Asia to the sound arts scene
• Celebration of sound diversity in mainstream clubs

What are archives

• The archive has been a huge topic for 20, 30 years, many artistic practises use archives
• A lot of archives look into the history of archives, they started off in western science they try to store and preserve knowledge

Sound archives under suspicion Miguel A. Garcia

Garcia brings up the correct way to collect a sound archive, He believes sounds where there to be collected.

• a)  Collected ‘things’—such as songs—are free of the collector’s influence
• b)  These ‘things’ can be removed from their contexts
• c)  These ‘things’ can be alienated from their creators
• d)  These ‘things’ can be lodged in containers: archives, files, discs, wax cylinders, diaries, shelves, cases, etc
• e)  In spite of all these manipulations, these ‘things’ can keep thequalities they had before the collector’s intervention

Cultural artefacts have a place within a communities, archiving is doing violence towards that culture or place.

Mele Yamomo states that “The ability to archive and to access the archive are positions and hegemony”. He states the problematic actions of the people who archive (people in power, colonialists).

Rhodes University, South Africa Archive

• Founded by a British man Hugh Tracy, he worked for the colonialist company
• 35,000 different recordings of traditional South African music
• It’s one of the largest archives in its history, his intention was lay down a “base”so people know what music was like in South Africa, he wanted to keep the music alive. The downfall of this is that he’s not the only one who wants to keep the music alive
• It seems the documentation of giving back to the people of these lost tribes feel a little inexact

Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives https://www.decoseas.org/initiatives/outreach

• SoAs is a company that look into anthropology and international culture research
• Video of a researcher giving back archived texts and stories that where recorded on the Phlipines
• A local woman gives her thoughts on why there local chants shouldn’t be put online, they take away from the community and is listened away from the local culture which takes away from its worth “it should not be a cemetery, but a sanctuary of music”

[Re:]Entanglements

Dead Birds (1963)

• It’s a sonic argumented sound for film, its sound recordings are collected from an exhibition to New Guine
• Its approach of narrative over residents of this country is distasteful, we don’t hear anyone included in the film talk, just a British narrator

The problems with archiving lost cultures

• The problem when documenting cultures is the loss of context, when certain knowledge is removed from a setting, it can loose its value and meaning. Ownership can also be an issue when taking from archive, who gets to own and or profit from these collections? In my view we want to celebrate these collections with communities that have lost so much.

• Right shout: Mclntosh County Shouters
• Underground Railroad songs
• Maroon music
• Blues
• Desert blues: Tishoumaren
• Afrofuturism

Looking at the linear ages of the Afro-sonic culture, because it had a huge impact on music.

The ring shout

• Survived from slave communities in the US, what happened is that slaves where restricted within their cultural life swell. Most slaves weren’t allowed to read, so they could develop so most the history is orally told through song and stories
• Slaves came from all over Africa so it was a huge mix of parts of Africa
• The ring shout was the main context in which Africans recognised values common to them, themes of ancestor worship and contact
• The Ring Shout is a rhythmic a beautiful sounding call and response chant, it had Christian connotations and could be triumphant, knowledge of these songs transmitted over generations

Common musical themes in The Ring Shout

• Calls, cries and hollers
• call-and-response
• Additive rhythms
• Off beat melodic phrasing
• Timbral distortions of all kinds
• Hand patting, foot stomping
• Constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases

The underground railroads

There where routes where slaves could take to be set free, as slavery was abolished in some states so you could escape to some states. Songs where made to motivate people to escape and take these routes to escape slavery

Marvin Hayes- Follow The Drinking Gourd

The musical tone is similar to the call and response of The Ring Shout, uses off beat melodic phrasing and calls.

Maroon music

Maroons where escaped slaves who started their own communities, they even fought back from slavers in Jamaica

“The word maroon comes from the Spanish word ‘cimarrones’, which meant ‘mountaineers’. They fled to the mountainous areas of Jamaica, where it was difficult for their owners to follow and catch them, and formed independent communities as free men and women.” (www.discoveringbristol.org.uk, n.d.).

Smithsonian Folkways – Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of Jamaica (1992)

You can still hear the African rhythms within maroon music, you can hear the defiance in the way they plan confidently and fast

Blues

Traditional African music compared to some blues, and they can manifest in themselves. Blues music falls heavy on African style music, with its call and response and off beat rhythmic hooks

Wavering melodies, and free singing song forms hold a sort of ancient secret

Afropop Worldwide – Africa and the Blues (1974)

This podcast goes into the talk about how to roots off Blues has origins in Africa, Arial Burnside from the Mississippi is the earliest form of blues music. Africa and the blues, its impossible to find the exact time that the music content of African music came to American and was processed into Blues but you can obviously see the resemblance

Tishoumaren (desert blues)

Actively picked up on American blues and merged it into their own style, they started in 1979 as they are a collective. They where formed in a refugee camp, the whole genre has become an international thing, the blues trailing from Africa to America then back to Africa.

Tinariwen (+IO:I) – Sastanàqqàm (2017)

Dub

Channel One and Aba Shanti-I are the best dub sound systems around, sound system culture has a very strong presents in UK. Jamaican immigrates came to the UK became hugely influential. Drum and Bass came from dub, when the band stops and its just the drum and bass.

Been transmitted from culture to culture, people who construct sound systems are quite secretive about how it’s built. Goes back in history, strong roots in Jamaica, grew up in a house with a sound system. “You cannot buy, it’s history for sound systems”. It was a way to get away from racist UK, it was educational for young kids good for the youth. The feeling of oneness and peacefulness goes beyond race.

Channel One & Aba Shanti-I: UK Soundsytem culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjczxwdyNGU

Afrofuturism

This idea of to imagine a future that is not racist and not anti-black, that we have all the rights as one another. When people where slaved, their history was abolished so there are people without a history. So they have to create their own notion of culture, one of those was is Afrofuturism.

How can they reinterpret technology as it being a westernised technology, how to recreate that as a history of forgotten culture.

Sun Ra

He created a space around himself that he embodied that he wasn’t from this earth, he thoughts was he’s not from this place he is from somewhere better.

Created a film called Space Is A Place, in it he plays an out of planet black man that teleports to Earth. “This music is all about tomorrow” gives show to Afrofuturism and the reinterpretation of music.