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Conversations in Sound and Power

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Conversations in Sound and Power

University of Utrecht

31.03.2017

 

This one-day international workshop brings together academics from various disciplines working on sound and power, with the aim of showcasing a diverse range of scholarship across the social sciences, arts and humanities in order to discuss current and new directions in the study of the politics of sound broadly conceived.

 

How do physical and psycho-social environments influence how we perceive sounds, and how do sounds influence how we perceive a place? How does music shape our being in the world and our experience of everyday life, of violence and of different power actors?  How do we study music and sound? Which new ways are there to think about methodology, and what does the focus on sound bring to our epistemological understandings of different disciplines? How does sound enter into practices of testimony and witness?

 

During this day, insights from anthropology, history, media studies, musicology and geography will be brought to bear on these issues and questions introduced above. We hope to achieve a sense of the multiple possibilities of studying the relations between sound and power. As this will be an explicitly interdisciplinary day, the focus will be on the exchange of experiences and practices, rather than on formal topics and themes, although we are interested in addressing sound, power and environment; sound and conflicts; and aural methodologies.

 

 

Approaching sound and music from different disciplinary perspectives and across different cultural contexts can shed light on the relations between power structures and perception: what is perceived as normal sound, which sounds do we notice, or continue to hear, which sounds are perceived to be noise, who is allowed to produce certain sounds?  Changes in technology also contribute to changes in the aural textures of everyday life, while differentiated access to a such technologies can in turn have consequences for existing power structures. We also seek more sensory views on these topics.  Non-representational theories in geography and beyond have strongly influenced social science conceptualizations of sound through research into the various affective and corporeal economies of sound.

 

Past and present conflicts have, as recent research has demonstrated, profound aural dimensions which remain under-theorised and under-researched.  From sonic weapons and tactics of control through to the role of sound in practices of witnessing and ethnographies of experience in conflict, new modes of thinking how war, sound and affect collide and re-shape both theory and empirical practice.

 

Also, growing research has been done about the role of music in conflicts. State and non-state power actors, like police, gangs and local militias have tried to seize control over music and musical events, deciding which music can be played and trying to regulate what the message is that the music can convey. But music has a power in itself, as its influence on its audience can never be determined unilaterally by the authorities, or by musicians, DJs or any other actor. Furthermore, the place in which music is heard, and other contextual characteristics, have consequences for how audiences experienced it.

 

The intersections of sound and power compel us to ask broader questions about our research methods and analysis.  Whilst we do not hold to the apocryphal statement that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, the translation of sensory media into language and vice versa presents us with challenges.  It is precisely these challenges that we hope to address by bringing together academics and practitioners from diverse fields.