Érudit's RSS Feed

Revisiting the Interplays of Sound, Meaning, Education 23

jashen edwards and Rebecca Rinsema
In their editorial for this issue, “Revisiting the Interplays of Sound, Meaning, Education 23,” jashen edwards and Rebecca Rinsema explain: "Drawing upon a range of research methodologies, conceptual framings, and artistic practices, SME 23 nurtured a space for scholarship promoting exploration, curiosity, and dialogue. From improvisational games inviting musical creativity to sonic art integrating experimental electronics, puppetry, and AI visuals; from hearing newly designed musical instruments to listening to local ambience on a semi-guided soundwalk—SME 23 provided multisensory participation. The energy over those three days was infectious. An obvious next step was to engage in another collaboration: between SME and Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation."

Oracle: For The Seven Cardinal Directions

These cards were created for a workshop at the Sound, Meaning, Education conference 2023. These Oracle cards are based on "The Torres Cycle" by Wilfrido Terrazas and feature original illustration by Esther Gámez Rubio.

Improvising with Technology: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Performance

Jonathan De Souza
In this article, I approach improvisation and technology via a network of concepts instead of binary oppositions, emphasizing reciprocity instead of hierarchy. This line of thinking is inspired by phenomenological approaches to technology, which I review in Part 1. Part 2 examines case studies related to performance, while Part 3 turns to pedagogical uses of improvisation. Across these contexts, I argue that improvisation has no single origin but emerges from the interplay of bodies and technologies that are situated in a world.

Allowing the A-Loud: Sonic Permission, Power, and Agency in the Classroom

Laura Jane Menard and Doug S. Friesen
As part of an ongoing collaborative exploration, Menard and Friesen have been led to consider the conditions for sonic permissions in public classrooms: What is allowed and a-loud in educational space? Who—and what—determines which sounds are un/desirable? How do the decisions made by teachers in classroom spaces enable, or disable, students' sonic agency? It is these questions about sonic permissions and power that we explore in this paper. We examine how classroom sonic expectations as tacitly understood, and, through a methodology-in-the-making, invite our reader into a descriptive review process based on a recording of a high school classroom. Through reflection, we describe conditions required for sincere attempts at sonic egalitarianism both in our teaching and research practices, and invite other teacher-researcher-practitioners into the ‘productive stumbling’ of our line of inquiry and commitment-making.

Stimming and Stereotypy: Situating Improvisation at the Margins of Sensibility

Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez
This article traces the ways that improvisation is being taken up by three distinct theories of sensory integration. The first stems from my experience of living with sensory dysfunction and extends into theories of autism. The second is the computational neuroscientific theory of predictive processing, and the third is an ecological approach to action and perception. The second and third models put forward the notion of abductive reason as a description of their cognitive processes, which, raised into consciousness they call improvisation.

Mental Radio

Craig Dongoski
This piece reflects research gleaned from the "Mental radio" course—which takes its title from the Upton Sinclair book of the same name—in which he tested and documented the telepathic capabilities of his wife Mary Claire Sinclair. "Mental radio" designates the transmission and reception of psychical content: intentions, images, or energies. The aim of the course is to explore mental radio as it applies to new modes of art-making. Our guiding principles have been expressivity, contingency, epiphany, precision, ritual, emergence, openness, and process. We are approaching the art-process from the mandate of intuition. What is in this article documenting the course is a testament to this process.

Everything is Improvised: How Political Economies of Improvisation Can Invert Critical Social Theories Towards Change for Care and Justice

Walter S. Gershon
This extended abstract simultaneously serves as the contextual information for the accompanying audio paper, a piece of fully sonic scholarship. This work articulates possible trajectories for a political economy of critical improvising. Rather than conceptualizing systems as top-down sociocultural constructions, this audio paper argues that, if everything is at some level improvisational, it is our improvisations that combine to construct our systems of understanding and their production. From this perspective, how one can improvise is an expression of the kinds of possibilities a given system can engender. Conversely, if everything is improvised, one can improvise otherwise towards change. Such a position neither naively negates questions of oppression nor suggests that individual actions alone are enough to make broader social and cultural change. However, such improvisational inversion does provide a modicum of hope in the reorientation of sociocultural structures in ways that reemphasize our individual and collective everyday actions of improvisation.

Keying Into Ambient Music: Attending to Soundscapes as Phenomenological Practice

Elk Paauw
Ambient music by its very nature is an embodied multi-sensory experience and radical ecological relation that takes up non-human interlocutors by centering sound as an object of inquiry, placing the listener in conversation with plants, animals, weather systems, physical objects, and architecture as interpenetrating subjects-in-space. Using Helen Fielding’s recent work Cultivating Perception Through Artworks as method, “Keying into Ambient Music” is a zine detailing how to engage in a phenomenological reading of ambient music to “key into” one’s surroundings and open up one’s mind relationally to our environment and non-human subjects. This engagement is explored visually as a comic as well as sonically, with an inter-media blend of the physical book as an art object, coupled with a digital suggested listening playlist, an appendix with a poem by Richard Brautigan, and an exercise from Pauline Oliveros’ Software for People, all of which acts as a jumping-off point for the reader/listener to kickstart their own phenomenologically-motivated ambient music practice.The zine’s starting blocks are Matt Evans’ 2020 album “New Topographics” and subsequent liner notes, an examination of how ambient music decenters the human subject as listener and instead makes the content of the music the act of listening itself. Through the digitization of the song-writing process through contact recordings of the artist physically writing translated into synthesized sounds, Evans uses this “sonic residue” as musical subject, connecting tactile sensation, digital archive, and auditory perception to create a “new topographics” of sound (Evans). This impulse situates Evans as taking up two different traditions in ambient music, Kankyou Ongaku or “environmental music” and Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening. Kankyou Ongaku, extending from the late 1960’s to early 70s New Age and avant-garde movements in Japan, uses architecturally-situated soundscapes to open up the listener to their environment. This movement collectivizes the music listening experience as a happening between inter-penetrating subjects that include manmade structures, fauna, and foliage, as well as humans. An adjacent movement is Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening, a musical practice developed in the late 1980’s as a school of thought focused on engaging in and developing sonic meditations and collective improvisations with the goal of “keying into” one’s environment through highly concentrated, reflective listening. By connecting to one’s acoustic surroundings, deep listening focuses the listener using mindfulness and intentionality to the relationality between human, nonhuman, and artificial forces, expanding one’s “boundaries of perception” (Oliveros). From these musical practices, I then explore the political potential of ambient music in unfolding relations between human and nonhuman subjects. Keying into ambient music can foster recognition of the interconnection of all beings and how to attend to that connection, which can work to dissolve the “anthropocentric ego” (Fielding 281). In surviving against late-stage capitalism and the destruction of our planet, keying into relations between nonhuman beings can forge new paths of resistance and revolt against the status quo of climate denial and inaction, and ambient music is just one tool we can use to build awareness of our interconnectedness and thus open up new ways of being.

European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-1975 by Harald Kisiedu

Jeff Schwartz

The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley

Benjamin Barson

Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal by Anthony Elms, Celeste DiNucci, and Mark Christmann

Cisco Bradley