[URBANTH-L]
CFP: Music, Sound, and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private
Space (Cambridge)
Angela Jancius
jancius at ohio.edu
Mon Feb 18 11:05:10 EST 2008
Music, Sound, and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private Space
Conference to be held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University, April 18-19th 2008
Organisers: Georgina Born and Tom Rice
This conference pursues themes raised by the recent burgeoning of the
interdisciplinary field of auditory culture studies, which has evolved at
the interface of historical and contemporary musicology, philosophy of music
and critical theory, ethnomusicology and anthropology of sound and senses,
sociology and social psychology of music, cultural studies, and the new
practices of sound art and site-specific music and sound.
The conference sits at the intersection of two related developments. First,
it addresses the ways in which sound and music, particularly as they are
technologically mediated, have come to play a pivotal role in re-drawing the
boundaries between the 'public' and the 'private' by individuals, groups and
institutions. There is growing awareness that acoustic strategies may be
used by groups and individuals in demarcating space, and in projecting
themselves within it, establishing new and often contested boundaries
between the public and the private. This tendency is striking in relation to
physical and virtual spaces, on the one hand, and to social spaces, on the
other; music and sound are increasingly used to mark territory, place, and
social identities. Music is employed both to humanise space and attract
sociality, and to discourage human contact and block off sociality. Although
some of these developments were apparent with analogue audio technologies,
they have been greatly exacerbated by digitisation and by music's privileged
relations with the internet, in which it leads other expressive artforms in
the degree and scale of its remediation. The conference will therefore
examine the manner in which musical and acoustical dynamics have become
integral to the construction and imagination of social and physical space,
and the ways in which they may be both constructed and negotiated.
Relatedly, the conference explores how the proliferation of sound
technologies has resulted in a situation in which acoustic environments are
increasingly malleable. To an unprecedented degree, music and sound are
being employed to create a 'nesting' of the private and public, while audio
technologies are used to effect a series of radical transformations of
musical experience: children using sound technologies to create individual
'private' environments within the collective, 'private' domestic space of
the home; soldiers using individual sound technologies inside tanks in
battle to construct a sense of intimate, affective space and identity which
fends off and occludes the 'public', ambient sounds of violent warfare; the
mobile phone used to create a new genre of private-in-public communication;
and real-time, embodied intersubjective musical practices being replaced by
virtual, disembodied music-making and virtually-distributed musical
cognition.
Understanding these developments requires that we make use of the conceptual
tools of musicology, the social sciences and critical theory, while also
necessitating that they be re-worked for the more complex, pervasive and
ramifying mediations of contemporary life. The conference therefore brings
together leading theorists of music, sound, mediation and modernity, as well
as those engaged in rich empirical research - historical, contemporary and
cross-cultural - to debate these developments and outline new perspectives
to advance the given coordinates bequeathed by Adorno, Benjamin, Murray
Schafer, as well as contemporary scholars such as Michael Bull, Tia DeNora,
Steve Feld and Jonathan Sterne.
A feature of the conference will be to integrate perspectives from those
working creatively with the new soundscapes: composers and sound artists,
some of them also engaged in empirical research, who are concerned to
reflect the new sonic environments in their creative work. We hope to have
a couple of performances or sound installations running alongside the event,
and we will ask a composer to produce a piece to illustrate the new
soundscapes in relation to changing private and public boundaries. The
conference will include speakers from several of the fields mentioned above;
it will be international in scope, involving speakers from the US and from a
number of universities within the UK. It will innovate in bringing
theoretical, historical and empirical perspectives together with composers
of sound art and site-specific music. One aim of the conference is to
produce papers towards an edited book. We are in dialogue with Duke
University Press to publish the collection, and intend to develop a volume
on the acoustic politics of space.
Speakers -
Philip Bohlman, Chicago
Michael Bull, Sussex
Eric Clarke, Oxford
Nicholas Cook, RHUL
Suzanne Cusick, NYU
Tia DeNora, Exeter
Nicola Dibben, Sheffield
John Drever, Goldsmiths
Further information and registration are available at the CRASSH
website: www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/musicsoundspace..html
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