Abstracts & Bios

Jean Carla Rodea, “Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina”

Buscando a Marina (Looking for Marina) is a vocal performance incorporating lecture, poetry, sound, and movement that explores intersections between history, ritual, transmission of knowledge, relationality, spirituality, and technology. It seeks a deeper understanding of the life of a Nahua woman known as “La Malinche,” an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary who played a key role in the so-called Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. While she is often considered a traitor and her story frowned upon, this work argues that in her role as mediator she actually set resistance practices in motion by challenging euro-centric roles assigned to women.

Jean Carla Rodea (born in Mexico City) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn. Her multimedia installations and performances focus on sites where sociopolitical and cultural constructs become visible. Through a combination of music, vocal performance, poetry, photography, video, movement, and sculpture, they explore how time is insistently constructed through memory.

Art Jones works with film, video, sound, objects, and photography. He often uses music, manipulated field recordings, text, live action video, and animation to produce movies. performances, and hybrid documents. Jones is based in New York City and lives in the Bronx.

Johann Diedrick (A Quiet Life) and Ethan Edwards (Nokia Bell Labs), “Cerulean Waters”

Cerulean Waters is an audio/visual performance that highlights the Newtown Creek, a body of water separating Brooklyn and Queens known both as one of the largest superfund sites in the city and one of the most polluted areas in the country. Cascading between underwater footage and hydrophonic field recordings, the work reveals the area’s post-industrial present, its storied past, and its uncertain future through an unhurried blend of video and audio recordings taken while boating along its water and walking around its neighboring streets at night. The performance features original music composition inspired by the waterway, weaving in underwater field recordings and voice-overs from local historian Mitch Waxman, who talks about the development of the area from a small residential neighborhood to the center of industrial gas and oil refinement. The sounds of waste management trucks, industrial cranes, and cars zooming past overhead on highways offer a stark reminder of how a former marshland was paved over and dredged from below in order to create a paradise for toxic dumping, rapid development, and unrestrained activities that diminished a local ecosystem. Meditative video scenes depict the area through underwater footage, rendering the creek as an alien landscape. Shots of metal scrap yards and suspension bridges are overlaid on top of footage of small plots of greenery that dot the creek’s worn-out shoreline. Footage of industrial work along the creek’s banks shows the kind of processes still in place that continue to bring pollutants into the water. Over the course of the 30 minute performance, audience members are given a multi-sensory tour of the Newtown Creek and are invited to contemplate its history, consider its present situation within our city’s sonic ecosystem, and speculate on its future.

Johann Diedrick makes installations, performances, and objects that allow you to explore the world through your ears. He surfaces vibratory histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is currently a 2020 technology artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works. Along with receiving an Asian Cultural Council grant, his work has been featured in Wire Magazine, Musicworks Magazine, and presented at MoMA PS1 (in collaboration with Jonathan González), Somerset House (London, UK), Social Kitchen (Kyoto, Japan), Common Ground (Berlin, Germany), Recess (Brooklyn, NY), Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY).

Ethan Edwards is an artist and researcher interested in history, beauty, and technology. His work seeks to create untimely spaces for contemplation. He works in music, photography, performance visuals, videogames, and many new uncategorized technological media. He is currently a Researcher at the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) program at Nokia Bell Labs where he works to generate collaborations between artists and engineers.

Participatory Performance: Christian Gentry and Rashin Fahandej (Emerson College), “A Father's Lullaby: Collaboration and Improvisation in Community-Driven and Site-specific Multimedia Art”

A Father's Lullaby is a multi-platform community-engaged project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and its direct impact on children, women and lower-income communities. The project is centered on marginalized voices of absent fathers while inviting all men to participate by singing lullabies and sharing memories of childhood. This project considers the public place as a site of collective experiences and for art to emerge without knowing it as “art.” Such public art can enable moments of pause, deep thinking, and actions which in turn reimagines the public site as a place to contemplate social issues, construct new meanings and social memories.

The project has many modes of presentation from site-responsive public sound installation to immersive video/sound installation. For the purposes of this conference, the collaborators propose to do a real-time multimedia improvisation with conference attendees. Many of the documented lullabies, stories, and images will be put in “conversation” with willing participants at the conference who will share their own stories and lullabies and in real-time, the sound artist will meld them together into a performance or ongoing installation.

Christian Gentry is a composer and sound artist. He explores sound in its various guises: as art, as music, as noise, as memory, as a symbol, as a commercial product, as whatever. His work resides easily inside art galleries, concert halls, or headphones. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Framingham State University where he teaches a variety of music theory, history, and electronic music courses. He resides in Framingham, Massachusetts with his wife, two kids, and one terrier and two cats.

Rashin Fahandej is a transdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College. Her projects center on marginalized narratives and foster the role of media, technology, and public collaboration for social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. She is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby, “ a multi-platform co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children, and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system in the United States. Another of her projects is “Marginalia,” a series of poetic documentaries where Baha’i immigrants of Iranian descent narrate their historical persecution in their homeland.

Fahandej has served as a 2017 Boston Artist-In-Residence with the Mayor’s Office of Art and Culture, a 2018 Public Art Resident at Boston Center for the Arts and a fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab. She is the 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and an Artist in Residence at ThoughtWork Arts and Scatter VR. Fahandej was the 2019 recipient of the James and Audrey Prize, and her immersive and interactive installation was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, August through December of 2019. As a selected lead artist at the 2020 American Arts Incubator, she will facilitate collaboration with creative communities abroad to create impactful community-driven public art projects that address local social and environmental challenges, through media, art, and technology.

Soundwalk: Dafna Naphtali, “Walkie Talkie Dream Angles - audio-augmented soundwalk in Washington Square Park”

Walkie Talkie Dream Angles is an electroacoustic composition and interactive sound walk for Washington Square Park by Dafna Naphtali — traversing sonically interesting corners of the park to underscore the loss of quiet, past and future sounds, bringing a favorite urban environment to life, in a sonically unique and individual way. Processed pre-recorded environmental sounds are layered with voice, and some thoughtful strategizing about site-specific listening, interactivity and attention span. LAUNCHED 2016, available 24/7 (or whenever the park is open) indefinitely. Dafna Naphtali will give a short talk about the soundwalk and help get participants ready to go on the walk. Bring a fully-charged smartphone, with GPS enabled and headphones/earbuds. For Information on downloading the app visit walkietalkiedreams.org

Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/electronic-musician, singer and composer of experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music using her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing of voice and other instruments. She creates works for multi-channel audio, musical robots, and interactive soundwalks, drawing on her eclectic musical background and work with experimental musicians and video artists in the US and abroad. Her audio-augmented reality soundwalks (free iOS/Android apps for U-GRUVE AR), include Walkie Talkie Dream Garden (http:// walkietalkiedreams.org) at the Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY) and Walkie Talkie Dream Angles at Washington Square Park (NYC). Her publications include numerous CDs, articles and book chapters including "Audio Augmented Reality For Interactive Soundwalks, Sound Art and Music Delivery" (Foundations in Sound Design for Interactive Media.) Naphtali's new multichannel installation "Audio Chandelier" will be presented on Governor’s Island in May through July 2020. www.dafna.info.

Catalina Jordan Alvarez (Antioch College), “Sound Spring” (Screen at the entrance - Film)

Sound Spring, my current film in post-production, stems from audio interviews with residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio. I preserve local stories: black and indigenous history, and the tumultuous history of student protest at Antioch College, alongside the personal anecdotes of my subjects. Each interview forms a short film within a feature-length experimental narrative. I conducted audio interviews with the villagers several months before shooting. Interviewees later lip-synced to the recordings of their voices on camera. In this way, the authentic moment of the original situation stayed intact—these audio recordings had taken place in hour long sessions like talk-therapy, where interviewees spoke associatively. By matching this stream-of-consciousness narration to a choreographed scene, I disembody the voice, suggesting memories of history of the village. But the points of contact, of lip-sync create “synchresis”— what Michel Chion describes as the “irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.” Finally, the layering of the original recording and the interviewee’s voice speaking along to it illustrates how we tell and re-tell the same stories. This is the third sequence in the film and takes place at the old student union on Antioch College's campus. I leave out the ambience so that bare silence or beats accompany the studio-recorded interviews—only occasionally does sound from the location slip in, further reminding us of this document's artifice.

Catalina Jordan Alvarez draws from her background in experimental theater to make filmic narratives which contrast a stylized mode with authenticity or document. Her narrative films are self-reflexive and contain interruptions such as musical breaks, temporal changes, prominent titles, etc. She also works collaboratively and pays special attention to the process of filmmaking and the relationships that ensue. Her films are often relevant to the location in which she shoots them and she makes use of non-professional actors there. She makes adjustments to their physical behavior, as the scene shifts from realism to fantasy and back. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College.

Christian Groothuizen (University of East London), “Resonant Objects: Communicating Vessels” (Exhibition Space - Sculptures)

This installation is a response to a passage in Juhani Pallasmaa’s book The Eyes of the Skin. Pallasmaa develops the idea of sound's inherent ability to conjure within the mind an entire city through a snapshot of aural experience: ‘Anyone who has half-woken up to the sound of a train or an ambulance in a nocturnal city, and through his/her sleep experienced the space of the city with its countless inhabitants scattered within its structures, knows the power of sound over the imagination; the nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city’. (Pallasmaa, 2005)

The objects are 3D printed from data sourced from a series of field recordings made by the artist. The field recordings were made at night in cities that the artist has lived in during his lifetime, South Auckland and London. They are three dimensional sonic snapshots of nocturnal spaces of slumber. The recordings explore sound’s complex relationship with architecture and the built environment. The work describes both the exploration through making of real objects and an enquiry into ‘Sound Objects’ as phenomenological events, drawing from Pierre Schaeffer’s view that the Sound Object, ‘is a kind of phenomenological quest for the essence of sound’. (Schaeffer, 2012) These investigations form the basis of an investigation into architectural space, sound and memory.

In his Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius (80 BCE to 15 BCE) describes how bronze ’acoustic urns’ were placed amongst theatre audiences to enhance the vocal performance of actors on stage. There are no known extant examples of this Greco/Roman technology. With the rediscovery of Vitruvius’ writings in the middle ages, many stone chapels, throughout France and England, were constructed with stoneware urns placed within the walls to obtain a similar effect. Modern scientific analysis shows that the effect is negligible. A recent theory suggests that the vessels were employed as portals to communicate with angels.

Christian Groothuizen is a New Zealand born artist, working and living in London. He has been described by Creation Records founder Alan McGee as ‘a bit of a space cadet’. He was a founder member of the 80’s Indie rock band The House of Love. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Fine Art at the University of East London. His interests are in sound practice, field recording and exploring the phenomenological role of sound and acoustics within the built environment. Recent exhibitions include: The Baroque unfolds to Infinity (2017), Resonant Objects: Portals of Emotion (2018), Communicating Vessels (2019), Four Corners, Credit Suisse Gallery (2019), Way Out East (2019), Sound/Image19 (2019)

Jake Nussbaum (University of Pennsylvania), “What The Garden Belongs To” (AV Room - Installation)

What the Garden Belongs To is a composition of field recordings made at the Growing Home Community Gardens in Philadelphia, PA. The community gardens were started in 2010 and are primarily managed and maintained by Southeast Asian migrants— Nepali, Bhutanese, Burmese Chin, Karen Burmese, and Kachin— who have migrated to South Philadelphia over the past 20 years, many under refugee status. This composition uses recordings made in the ground, water, and air to challenge familiar categories like urban, natural, infrastructural, human and nonhuman, and to prod at our understandings of belonging, place, and nature in the context of the city.

Jake Nussbaum is a multidisciplinary artist and musician, and PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He researches creative practices that use improvisation like sculpture, dance, music, and ceremony, and how those practices manifest in urban political life. He is affiliated with the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and a member of the band 7 Count.

Dana Elkis (New York University), “Sirens” (AV Room - Installation)

Sirens is an interactive web-based composition, playing a ten-hour and fifty-threeminute score that contains all the civil defense Sirens I heard throughout my life (1988-2019). The visual layer attached to each Siren is a real-time surveillance CCTV camera from the closest location to where the sirens was initially heard. Users are welcome to watch the composition in order but are also able to scrub through, both forward and backward to explore different sounds and spaces.

The sound of a breaking war-time siren was a recurring auditory feature of my childhood, those sounds were embedded in me as a child without a critical-emotional response. Only when I left Israel in my adulthood did I revisit this subject. The shelter and the Siren are critical elements in an Israeli war-time emergency event. I learned that the stark difference between the shelter and the civil defense siren is that the shelter can be disguised as a room. The shelter, an almost motherly figure in an emergency, can give you the peace of mind to pass through reality with less worry. It may even allow you to forget about the threat. The Siren, designed to pierce the everyday bubble with the truth of the matter, is here to announce what the reality is that people live under constant threat. From the moment the 60-second Siren breaks, it rules all aspects of the physical and personal space. Until it is safe to leave the shelter, the reverberation of the Siren is left in the air, making the ear sharp and tuned to every detail - Like a surveillance camera, waiting for the Missile to hit. Since I was so focused on audio, the visual memory is a blur; the majority of times, it doesn't exist at all.

This research draws on my process of reinterpreting the place I come from, and on the Israeli collective memory, which avoids processing these emergency events. This is one way for me to unpack where I come from. To gather all the information, I contacted all the official Israeli authoroties, but none of them kept up to date lists. Eventually, the list was collected detail after detail from old newspapers, recorded new editions, shared family memories, and school registries.

Dana Elkis. Research led graphic designer based in Brooklyn. Practiced versatile projects in the field of visual communication and audio. From the execution of concept-driven, commissioned projects to self-initiated studies. While I enjoy being curious, meticulously detailed, playful and an intuition-driven maker, I'm drawn to design that's led by content and not designers; a design that has relevant longevity and purpose. Currently in my second year, studying for my master in NYU - ITP (Interactive tellecomunication program). danaelkis.com

Katya Rozanova, Nire, and Camilla Padgitt-Coles, “Hole” (AV Room - Installation)

We are proposing an interactive sound installation, organic-machinic ecosystem, that acts as a self-reflexive instrument for the city to play. We propose to combine in this project the interactive sound recording and production systems we have built. One such system records snippets of auditory and sub auditory (vibration-based) environmental sounds, cuts them up, and stitches them together to emit an ongoing, abstracted, real-time sonic portrait of New York City. Another system records the pitches of the sounds in the environment and translates them in real-time into a musical composition. A third system would record sounds that are out of auditory perception and scale them up or down for the installation. In this way, we would create living sonic portraits of specific sites, including living and nonliving sounds from past and present, ranging from Greenwood Cemetery to Brooklyn’s construction sites to the sounds of tree networks and underground insect activities of public parks. Interlocking systems morphing into a cyborg organism. The soundscape is a mix of past recorded sound intermixed with speculative sounds and reflective sounds and finally the manipulated bits of real-time sound that listeners emit while conversing or simply breathing next to the object. In this way, the participants are made aware of their presence inside of the sonic composition and identified as complicit in this ecosystem. Ideally, these sound-emitting and sound-recording pods would remain installed in the environments where they absorbed past sounds, which would provide an opportunity for these sites to continue to imprint onto the composition. Whether installed in original locations or brought together in one new location at NYU, these pods would serve as sites of sound production, listening, and audience participation. Acknowledging our presence’s effects on the surroundings, we hope to facilitate a more active engagement with all the seen and unseen, heard and unheard, living and machinic actors of this city.

Katya Rozanova is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, activist, and educator. She is pursuing a master’s degree in art and technology at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where she uses traditional and emerging technologies to create work that examines people's understanding of one another and their environment. Her focus is sculpture, networked sound objects, audiovisual installation, socially engaged art, and speculative world-making. She explores the relationship between human centrality and nonhuman agency, labor and art-making, order and chance. She teaches art and design at NYU and CUNY.

Nire is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens, NY, working in music/sound, performance, video and new media. She is a recent graduate of NYU Tisch’s ITP masters program where she explored relations of humans and nonhumans - organic and machinic, mysticism and animism. She’s interested in blurring artistic practice, knowledge-sharing spaces and performance. Nire is a recipient of the Red Burns Scholarship, a SUNY Purchase Art+Design scholarship and a participant of the Red Bull Music Academy. Her work can be seen in: Dazed Magazine, NPR, Fader, Interview Magazine, Allure and XLR8R, and has had contributing work in MoMA PS1, National Sawdust and Marjorie Barrack Museum.

Camilla Padgitt-Coles is a multimedia artist working in real-time physical atmospheres with light and sound. She is interested in highlighting fundamental forces around us and applying these through light and sound in her work. In 2019 she completed a master’s degree at ITP-NYU. Projects and collaborations she has worked on span contexts of performance, standalone installations, and musical releases. She has shown live visuals or performed music at The Kitchen, Basilica Hudson, Issue Project Room, Roulette, MoMA PS1, and the New Museum. She currently has a solo show, "The Tuning House," on view at Essex Flowers in NYC.

Leila Adu-Gilmore, “Embodied Listening: Field Recordings of Sites of Listening in Accra” (AV Room - Installation)

In Ghana, embodied listening occurs through listening for pleasure and dance—new genres morph throughout existing sites of listening. From the 1890’s to 1970’s, palm wine music and subsequently highlife music (hybrids of traditional Ghanaian music and western music of the pre-independence British period) necessitated sites of embodied listening. Since then, electronic forms of Ghanaian music, such as burger highlife, hiplife, and afrobeatz, and other forms of music from the African continent have continued this tradition of embodied listening. Throughout Accra in nightclubs, taxis, tro-tros (public transport in crowded vans), outdoor bar/restaurants, and street parties play loud music to dancers and listeners alike. This is a collection of spatial audio field recordings of sites of embodied listening in Accra from September 2019.

Composer-theorist Leila Adu-Gilmore’s instrumental compositions have been played at the Kennedy Center and Ojai Festival; her solo piano and voice project has performed in Europe, US, Russia, Ghana and Asia and released four acclaimed albums, including Italian National Radio’s label. In 2019, her collaborative releases included afrobeat trip-hop band on XVI Records London featured by BBC Radio 6’ Giles Peterson; improvised trio Tre Zampe on Nunc Records, Paris and “Asylums for the Feeling” with Wonderful Noise Japanese label’s video game trailer reached over 10million Youtube views. Adu-Gilmore received her BMus (Honours) from Victoria University, Wellington NZ; composition Phd from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor in NYU Steinhardt’s music technology program.

Note: Leila Adu-Gilmore is presenting a related paper on Panel 1.

Daniel Fishkin, “Solar Sounds” (Silver, room TBD)

A Solar Sounder is a synthesizer played by sunlight. Conventional electronic circuits depend on regular voltage sources such as batteries to function dependably. However, the Solar Sounder is designed differently. Its circuit board is governed by sunlight, powering an internal synthesizer designed to function with an ever-fluctuating power source. The goal is not to conserve charge, but to make music, and the wide variations in voltage as the sunlight changes results in a continuous flow of rhythm and timbres.

Solar Sounders are housed in hollow boxes with good acoustics, and live outdoors, withstanding rain and snow. These instruments come to life in a group, twittering merrily, their song changing with daylight. Unlike most electronic instruments, tethered to the power grid or wasting batteries, the solar sounder is self-contained. It makes music continuously and messily; sloughing sound like a cherry blossom tree sheds its petals.

As a composer and circuit designer, the challenge behind Solar Sounders is to make interesting compositions take place on the circuit board itself—studying elemental configurations of low-current transistor oscillator and filter circuits and “tuning” the circuit by listening to the sounds it makes in different light conditions. Working with transistors instead of computers is not regressive, because it constitutes a novel way to theorize classical circuits—basic configurations such as the phase shift oscillator retain their pitch relationship in varying light conditions due to its resonant nature. Therefore this old dusty circuit delivers harmonic persistence in the sunlit concert.

Amanda L. Scherbenske (The New School), “Emplacing Race in New York's Experimental-Avant-Garde Juncture”

In 2005, saxophonist and composer John Zorn founded a music venue dedicated to “the experimental and avant-garde” on New York’s Lower East Side. Criticism has examined the principles, history, and material constraints of venues that cater to such cutting-edge music, but it does not reflect recent studies that challenge a historiographic rift racializing these so-called jazz and non-jazz musical vanguards. Scholarship in architecture, design, and urban studies, meanwhile, has shown that the location and presentation of sites matter but has not explicitly afforded them agency. Building upon Steven Feld’s conceptualization of place (1987; 1996) and recent music studies that extend a “capacity for action” to things (Bates 2012; Piekut 2011; 2014), this paper bridges this gap by proposing emplacement to discuss not only actions, like performing memory, but also things, like design, through place. I consider how New York’s avant-garde-experimental juncture provides a critical space to negotiate the commonly-held racializations of these musical vanguards. First, I show that remembering the defunct club Tonic (1998-2007) as a hub for participants varying in race, experience, gender, and nationality as well as overlapping but distinctly racialized downtown communities eschews a stable racialization. Next, I demonstrate how Zorn’s venue The Stone (2005-2018) aspires to bridge this “inclusive” past to its present while crafting an indeterminate racial positioning. Unsettling putative racializations, these instances of emplacement potentially accommodate many. I argue that, ultimately, they make space for navigating racial subjectivities that range from a feeling of belonging, on one hand, to ambivalence about musical and historiographic blackness, on the other.

Amanda Scherbenske, PhD, is part-time faculty at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Her research interests in race, civil rights, environment, and memory span jazz, classical, popular, and traditional music in the United States. She is currently working on two book projects that marry her training in ethnomusicology with her interest in musicology. In an ethnography of New York musicians situated originally within a jazz art world, she examines genre, canon, race, and gender in the transformation and critique of contemporary elite culture in America. In a historical study (1968 – 1974), she considers how the pursuit of civil rights through music and institutions challenge accepted notions of black nationalism and racial integration.

Tom Wetmore (Columbia University), “Listening as Relational Ontology in a Basement Jazz Club”

This is a paper about a “weird pie-shaped room” (Fred Hersch, pers. comm.). This is a particularly famous triangular room, in a basement off Seventh Avenue South in New York’s West Village, a space which has since 1935 hosted the Village Vanguard, the city’s oldest and most renowned jazz club. I combine ethnographic observations with acoustical analysis and archival research to expand beyond the notion of the club as simply an inert, blank space that is filled with human creativity. This investigation is inspired by the club’s inimitable sound, which combines a striking lack of reverberation with an equally striking liveness in the early reflections, leading to both clarity and intimacy—all of which is intimately tied to the room’s peculiar shape. Interrogating this shape, and the history of how the room came to be this shape, leads to the central material history I explore: the construction of Seventh Avenue South and the Seventh Avenue Subway line. Prior to 1917, Greenwich Village was an isolated enclave, cut off from New York’s grid system—and its automobile culture—to the north and from downtown business interests and the outer boroughs to the south. The new thoroughfare and subway line not only transfigured the cultural and ethnic character of the community, but physically chopped up the neighborhood. In many cases, what were once rectangular blocks were bisected into “tiny triangular plots of land too small for residential use and generally ignored” (Historical Preservation Report, 1969). It is one of these “generally ignored” plots that became the “weird pie-shape” of the Village Vanguard. Tracing relational associations across these and other material histories, I explore how the physical space of the Village Vanguard, and the sounding and listening that take place within it, comprise a complex assemblage of vibrant human and non-human materialities deeply entwined with New York’s spatially and temporally sprawling relational ontology.

Tom Wetmore is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, where he works at the intersection of music, race, space, and technology. His dissertation rethinks the mediation of social difference through the ethnographic study of sound engineering and acoustics in live performance venues. While editor of the peer-reviewed journal Current Musicology, he edited two issues, including the special issue, Sounding the Break: Music Studies and the Political (2018). He also co-edited another special issue, on Black Sound Studies (2017).

Leila Adu-Gilmore (New York University), “Reimagined Spaces: Grassroots and Government Practices in Electronic Music in Accra”

Music in Accra has an ecosystem that is progressive due to its fluid background and lack of industry involvement, signifying that it is both easier and necessary to innovate in order to survive. Founded in 1975, the Musician’s Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) pre-Independence Accra waterfront building was originally gifted by the government — in 2019, the president of Ghana has pledged to build a new head office by the end of the year, due to a beachside tourist complex planned for 2027. This uneasy juxtaposition between Ghana’s pre-Independence past, relative stability on the African continent, and new identity as one of the forerunner of African progressive commercialism, is indicative of Ghana’s seemingly intrinsic interlaced relationship between music, the government, and the music industry. Moreover, in Ghana and the Global South there are local disadvantages such as lack of enforcement on intellectual property through copyright payments and the widely accepted practice of bootleg copies, lack of access to consistent electricity sources, and exceptionally high taxes on imports. However, music producers in Accra address local economic disadvantages with a large output of music and alternative listening spaces. First, this is possible, in part due to the relatively accessible software and hardware worldwide, as music technology has become more economic in both price and scale, allowing for smaller high quality studios that has become particularly relevant and inclusionary in the global south. Second, innovations that subvert the traditional music distribution model make Ghana stand apart from the western music industry’s monolithic footprint. Third, sites of listening, such as public transport, pop-up club spaces, and outdoor venues, are ground up enterprises that necessitate community involvement over urban planning policy. Hence, this paper looks at various types of studio music production in Accra: from small to large with new or established means of music distribution.

Composer-theorist Leila Adu-Gilmore’s instrumental compositions have been played at the Kennedy Center and Ojai Festival; her solo piano and voice project has performed in Europe, US, Russia, Ghana and Asia and released four acclaimed albums, including Italian National Radio’s label. In 2019, her collaborative releases included afrobeat trip-hop band on XVI Records London featured by BBC Radio 6’ Giles Peterson; improvised trio Tre Zampe on Nunc Records, Paris and “Asylums for the Feeling” with Wonderful Noise Japanese label’s video game trailer reached over 10million Youtube views. Adu-Gilmore received her BMus (Honours) from Victoria University, Wellington NZ; composition Phd from Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor in NYU Steinhardt’s music technology program.

Note: Leila Adu-Gilmore is presenting a related sound installation at the Avery Fisher Center.

Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis (New York City Department of Education), “Freetown Soundscape: Chosan’s Love Song to Sierra Leone”

Emcee Chosan travelled to Sierra Leone in December 2017 to film the video for his song “Say It Again.” He envisioned it as a hip-hop love letter to the capital city, Freetown, which is his birthplace. Chosan juxtaposed shots of the bustling city center, congested roadways, as well as stretches of the sandy coast. There were also moments in the video featuring snippets from Freetown’s soundscape. There were sounds of birds chirping, excerpts from conversations, and wheels swooshing across the roads. These sounds accompanied the quotidian activities shown in “Say It Again.”

During an August 2018 trip to Freetown to visit my family, I had the opportunity to navigate the city in cars, taxis, and khekhes (covered motorized tricycles). Consequently, I experienced many of the sights and sounds appearing in the “Say It Again” video. Moving throughout Freetown offered a full multisensory perspective of the city. This added a new dimension to my four years of collaborative work with Chosan. My time in Freetown reinforced educator Maisha T. Winn’s notion of “worthy witnessing” – actively building meaningful relationships with collaborators based on invoking positive change, strengthening shared communities, and working diligently on public representation. This is what I sought to accomplish through my partnership with Chosan and my time in Sierra Leone.

This presentation examines how the Freetown soundscape is used in Chosan’s “Say It Again” video. I will incorporate artist interviews, informal conversations, and lyrical analyses. Details from Chosan’s 2018 New York “Say It Again” video debut and my journey to Freetown will also be included. Moreover, I will feature feedback from Chosan following preliminary research on this topic to illustrate the role of worthy witnessing in our work together. In so doing, I will demonstrate how the “Say It Again” video offers a unique sonic interpretation of Freetown.

Dr. Abimbola Kai-Lewis is a teacher in the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE). She is a former New York City Teaching Fellow with experience working in both charter and public schools. Dr. Kai-Lewis has served on citywide NYCDOE education teams and online learning committees. She completed her dissertation in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research investigated the music of South African hip-hop collective Cashless Society. Dr. Kai-Lewis is currently conducting collaborative explorations of the music of New York-based emcee Chosan. Additionally, she is preparing an elementary school hip-hop curriculum for publication.

Cynthia Citlallin Delgado (New York University), “dissident trans-its: Mexico City and the performances of la Bruja in Texcoco”

Holding a copy of the Mexican tabloid newspaper El Metro and pointing to an article in its weekly column Nosotros Los Jotos,i musician and performer La Bruja de Texcoco (1987) exclaimed: “I mean, I [my image] appeared between the cadaver of the dead narco-dude and the big-boobed lady, you know? There I was, in the between.”ii Caught in a violent dialectic of death and sex, of the criminal and the sensational, La Bruja’s emphasis on form rather than content reveals a preoccupation with the manner in which her musical and trans–feminine performances intervene in the spaces of Mexico City.

Following this urban object as it bursts open the material, historical, sonic, and sexualized spaces through which it trans–its, and engaging in a close reading of her song and video project “Suite Aquelarre” (2018), this paper explores the ways in which La Bruja de Texcoco’s performances not only contribute to the present aesthetization of the city but dis-order its reigning logics and politics. Resonating amidst the sounds of harps and jaranas, conchas and ocarinas, La Bruja’s musicality juxtaposes the multiple historical times and spaces that constitute the present of Mexico City and, through sonic and spatial superpositions, her work disrupts the dualisms of day/night, rural/urban, and sex/gender that contour city life. Riffing off Walter Benjamin, this paper approaches La Bruja’s performances as musical flashes that bring to the fore the simultaneous temporalities – past, present and perhaps, a queer Muñozian futurity – that make up Mexico City, looking specifically to what the musical and spatial elements of La Bruja’s performances reveal of the co-constitutive relationship between performance, aesthetics, the city and the self. La Bruja allows us to hear the histories emanating from the cityscape, while simultaneously listening to the dissident (transfeminist) rhythms of its postcolonial present.

Cynthia Citlallin Delgado is an interdisciplinary art-maker and a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. Her interests lie at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, queer/transfeminist performance, decolonial and urban studies. Her dissertation, “dissident trans–its: performance in the interstices of mexico city” seeks to locate the liminal spaces over which trans– performance unfolds to create an urban cartography of desire and dissidence that occurs in transit – both spatial and embodied. Considering transfeminist performance, theories of (urban) movement and affect studies, she explores the ways in which aesthetic interventions reconfigure lived and imagined space bound up by conditions of violence. Her work has appeared in Women & Performance, and Trans Studies Quarterly. She is currently the book reviews editor at Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.

Michael Palmese (National University of Ireland, Maynooth), “Notes from the Underground: Exploring Bay Area Musical Culture through the Berkeley Barb”

The Berkeley Barb was an underground newspaper established by Max Scherr in Berkeley, California and published from 1965 to 1980. As one of the most influential newspapers produced by the ongoing counterculture, the Berkeley Barb was instrumental in reporting on news and propagating writings concerning the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the Free Speech movement. The purely historical value this newspaper provides is immense: it affords us intimate, ground-level insights into the cultural zeitgeist of the Bay Area during a period of intense ferment and activity. The Barb was not, however, strictly dedicated to political news and commentary. It also provides exciting avenues from which to observe the ongoing development of the Bay Area musical culture from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s.

This paper provides an overview of the diverse and colorful cast of composers, artists, ensembles, and performance spaces covered in the pages of the Berkeley Barb by drawing on voluminous pieces of criticism, concert calendars, and interviews that attest to the richness of the musical environment. I focus on such figures as Ben Jacopetti, Roland Young, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe; venues such as the Open Theater; and criticism relating to such watersheds as Woodstock, Altamont, and the failed Wild West Festival. These many and varied examples are illustrative of how the musical culture developed—as well as how it sometimes faltered—in the Bay Area of the 1960s and 1970s.

Michael Palmese is a visiting lecturer in music at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and earned his PhD in musicology at Louisiana State University with a minor in comparative literature. His primary research interests encompass music and art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly minimalism and postminimalism, Samuel Beckett, and the intersections between music and politics. Michael is currently engaged in archival research devoted to exploring the development of postwar American musical culture through studies of underground newspapers and is also writing a book chapter for a forthcoming edited collection with Classiques Garnier in 2021 that examines Samuel Beckett’s style of musical criticism in his personal correspondence.

Max Jack (Humboldt University in Berlin), “‘If We Don't Sing, Then They've Won!’ Atmosphere and the Governance of Public Affects at FC Union Berlin”

Exploring the role of atmosphere in the context of soccer fandom, I examine hardcore fans called ultras at Football Club Union Berlin who drive crowd participation in the stadium and the surrounding urban space through continuous singing, clapping, flag-waving, and the (illegal) lighting of marine flares. As the most intensively invested supporters of FC Union, the ultras bear contradictory classifications as culture bearers of the team while simultaneously being labeled by the state and the German Football Association (DFB) as “problem fans” that discredit the safety and professionalism of the football clubs they support. In response to the ultras’ coordination of crowd performativity in and around the stadium, an assemblage of competing governing apparatuses have intervened with an interest in alleviating risk and potentially inflammatory dispositions of the fans. The overarching threat that ultras pose pertains to their ability to modulate mood and influence collective action in ways that extend far past the realm of "ordinary affects" (Stewart 2007) in urban space. Within the crowd, participatory performance replaces rational-critical discourse as the primary means of debate and negotiation (Warner 2002) and challenges notions of individuality and interiority as the assumed traits of the liberal democratic subject (Weidman 2006, Gaonkar 2014). In contrast to the text-based rational-critical discourse idealized as characteristic of the public sphere, I argue that atmosphere is an affective-discursive realm through which ultras negotiate subjectivity—that which is perceived as deviant because it deconstructs individualism, interiority, and reason as assumed traits of liberal democratic citizenship.

Max Jack is an affiliated researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Receiving his PhD from UCSB in 2019, his dissertation examines the ways in which hardcore soccer fans coordinate crowd affects as a means of protesting the consumptive and individualistic aspects of neoliberal citizenship. His forthcoming article coming out in the journal 'Ethnomusicology' develops the concept of atmosphere to articulate the ways in which crowd action can be used as a means of social and political commentary in public spaces.

James Gabrillo (The New School), “Sounding Public Space in Manila’s Palengke”

Manila’s public marketplaces, palengkes, buzz and throb to a dense urban overture: one that reflects the rich diversity of layered sounds that Filipinos experience daily. Voices crisscross an open-air marketplace, merchants banter and bargain with customers, peddlers-cum-performers burst into song and dance to entice passers-by, and vendors blast music from loudspeakers, as though stifling the acoustic allures of nearby rivals. Grounded in observational and participatory ethnography, and supported by interviews with merchants, customers, and passers-by, my study examines the sounds that emerge in Divisoria, the largest dry-goods market in Manila. Typically open for business seven days a week, palengkes are the preferred commercial source for the household needs of Filipinos, given the cheaper prices they offer when compared to supermarkets and air-conditioned malls. In listening closely to sounds that emerge in these environments — and analyzing what these sounds mean in the contexts of personal and collective expression, as well as of the country’s evolving cultural traditions — I offer an alternative way to look at public spaces in Manila. My research contributes to work on soundscapes of urban spaces, such as the ongoing audio portraits of cities around the world by the Community Innovators Lab. My project expands on their methodology as I conduct interviews with the people who work, shop, and pass through the spaces of palengkes, providing concrete evidence of how soundscapes and popular music shape human experience.

James Gabrillo is a lecturer in cultural and media studies at The New School. He finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University in 2019 and a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Cambridge in 2018. His work has been published in the journals Musical Quarterly, Rock Music Studies, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is co-editor of the book collection Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation (forthcoming, Open Humanities Press) and has chapters in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies (Oxford University Press) and Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production (Intellect Books).

Carlos Cuestas (CUNY Graduate Center), “Sonic Multi-Temporalities: Dislocating Memory and History through Live Performances in Mexico City's Centro Histórico”

Mexico City swallows the imagination through its ungraspable enormity in terms of population and geography; in its divides and junctures between race and class; in its relations between the physical and spiritual realms. These dialectical networks animate a complex relationship with temporality mediated by and through sound in Mexico City’s centro histórico (historic center). Complementing the architectural juxtapositions of colonial palaces and cathedrals built on top of Aztec pyramids, this part of the city reverberates with the thumping of the pre-Columbian huehuetl of Aztec dancers and healers, the melifluos nineteenth-century organillo, the maudlin crooning of 1950s boleros, and the desired cosmopolitanism of buskers playing rock, string quartets, and lonesome singer-songwriters. Encapsulating these live performances looms the greater soundscape of street vendors, traffic, and recurrent political demonstrations, making the urban experience that of a time lapse in which one comes in and out of historical time. Through soundscape recordings taken in the summer of 2019, this paper intends to demonstrate how the music-objects listed above unravel a complex dialectical relationship with time and memory in Mexico City. This multi-temporality, I argue, requires the simultaneous live performance of all these genres strategically located around historical landmarks that challenge contemporary perceptions and experiences of linear time, each one claiming a particular moment in Mexico’s long history of an imagined, successful national past. Through this analysis, I argue that the sounds emanating from these live performances enmesh Mexico City’s historical memory within well-established conflicts of ontological modernities and resistance circulating in Latin American political identity.

Classical guitarist and early plucked instrumentalist Carlos Cuestas is an active performer based in New York City. His musical versatility has allowed him to perform as a soloist and in chamber, orchestral, and traditional music ensembles on different plucked instruments in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Ireland, and Japan (March 2020). As a guitarist, Mr. Cuestas has done in-depth studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century guitar repertoire, particularly music for keyboard and guitar, and the art of improvisation in the style of the early Romantic period. As a continuo player, Mr. Cuestas has participated in numerous projects including opera and oratorio productions in New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco. Mr. Cuestas has also delved into the centuries-old son jarocho tradition from Veracruz, Mexico, playing a consort of traditional instruments, and is a member of New York City ensemble Radio Jarocho. Mr. Cuestas, a Colombian national, is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center researching the effects of environmental change in the poetic and musical practice of son jarocho.

Ksenia Mayorova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “Sound and the City in Contemporary Russia: Enjoying Rights or Violating Borders”

Sonic practices in urban space establish power relations that are not always noticeable by urban agents, especially humans. The idea of sonic ignorance [Schafer 1977] becomes even more dramatic as we acknowledge the fact that non-sonic practices also have sonic consequences, which makes all urban agents producers of the soundscape. The invisibile power of sonic relations is effective notwithstanding cultural and economic conditions. Nevertheless, in the so-called post-Soviet cities, the power relations established by sounds seem to take an exagerrated form. The shift from socialistic values to capitalistic system brought confusing and contradictionary behavioural patterns to the city space. Very often this leads to disability to establish and keep one's personal boundaries. As a consequence, we constantly face a conflict between enjoying one's right to the city on the one side and refusing to take the responsibility for one's actions on the other.

The proposed presentation aims at revealing the main power attitudes daily practiced in the space of Russian cities in the form of sound production. To do that we elaborated the concept of sonic violence, which helps to highlight the construction of sonic assymetries. Based on the philosophical distinctions objective/subjective violence [Zizek 1989], physical/symbolic violence [Bourdieu 1979], violence/authority [Kojeve 1942], the concept of sonic violence presupposes both the physical powers of sound [Goodman 2009] as well as its symbolic and political implications [LaBelle 2018]. In the context of contemporary Russian cities, we propose to consider various urban communicational situations in the perspective of their sonic representations. Through analyses of such practices as busking, protesting, listening to the music, revelaing confidential information, using noisy vehicles and other ways of sonic identification in urban environment, we would like to reveal ideological sources and ethical challenges of urban soundscapes in Russian cities, as well as their political implications.

Ksenia S. Mayorova is Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Urbanism, Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

Ian Copeland (Harvard University), “Listening to the Humanitarian City: Sound and Difference in Lilongwe, Malawi”

Many internationally led humanitarian projects utilize musical strategies in the hope of inculcating an aesthetics of togetherness, a particularly salient dynamic for organizations relying on the labor and enthusiasm of expatriate volunteers. Employing a sonic ethnography of Lilongwe, Malawi’s spatially segregated and unevenly industrializing capital city, this paper argues that such togetherness is undermined by project participants’ modalities of everyday listening. The paper’s three parts—the street, car, and home—each outlines a site of Malawians’ and non- Malawians’ contrasting modes of sonic attention. “The street” considers how the apperception of ambient noise and everyday speech structures residents’ experiences of ambulation in a city with few sidewalks but in which many commuters walk several miles a day. “The car” frames vehicles—both the minibuses that comprise public transport and privately owned cars that circulate within itinerant expatriate communities—as scenes of communal and private audition that alternatively withhold and extend sonic autonomy. “The home” suggests that the high security walls that enclose many expatriates’ domiciles attempt to bifurcate not only physical space but sonic space as well. Overall, the paper contends that attention to non-musical sound provides a rejoinder to the uncritical conflation of African music and progress in humanitarian contexts.

Ian Copeland is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. His dissertation projects examines the musical and interpersonal ramifications of international aid, volun-tourism, and HIV/AIDS activism in the Southern African nation of Malawi. His research has been supported by the Presser Foundation, the US Fulbright Program, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the 21st Century Fellowship from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Yaprak Melike Uyar (Freie Universität Berlin), “DIY Under Authoritarian Politics: Indie Scene in Istanbul”

Istanbul, as a city connecting the two continents, has a rich musical and cultural heritage combining the local and global in the same pot, with a distinctive flavor creating many subcultures evolved around a variety of ethnicities and political acts. While the last decade has marked the era of indie record companies and self-released albums, the indie scene of the city gains global visibility through a new wave of Turkish psychedelic acts. Having its roots on the 1970s Anatolian pop/rock, bringing psychedelic and prog rock with Turkish folk music influences, the alternative music scene in Istanbul created an impact in the cultural life of the city since 2000s. However, following the Gezi Protests (27 May-20 August, 2013), with the rising authoritarianism of the AKP government; performance venues, and musical practices started to shift. Gezi Protests, started as a reaction to commercialization of urban spaces in Istanbul, mainly Gezi Park, were a response of a variety of different non-governmental actors to the increasing authoritarianism in Turkey.

This paper intends to examine the influence of authoritarian politics of the post-Gezi era on the formation on DIY initiatives in the indie music scene of Istanbul. Tom Parkinson explored the indie music's counter-hegemonic aesthetics in Istanbul, and indie musicians’ responses to the Gezi protests with a focus on the dynamics of secularism and Islam on the music scene (2017). Whereas my work focuses on the inner power dynamics in the contemporary urban space, with the aid of an ethnography conducted as a participant observer of the scene as a DJ, former music writer, and popular music scholar. This piece concentrates on the musical DIY initiatives in the indie music scene of Istanbul within a time duration of 2013-2019.

Yaprak Melike Uyar is an ethnomusicologist. Her main areas of research are jazz and popular musics of Turkey and the music of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology (Turkish Music State Conservatory), MA in ethnomusicology (Istanbul Technical University), and BA in administration (Boğaziçi University). She is also a DJ, performing at various venues in Istanbul with an eclectic genre selection ranging from afro-beat to disco and psychedelia to jazz. Recently, she has been an Academy in Exile fellow at Freie Universität Berlin in the Critical Thinking program.

Audrey Amsellem (Columbia University), “The Noise of Silent Machines: A Case Study of LinkNYC”

In 2016, the city of New York and the Google-owned company CityBridge launched LinkNYC, a communication network that enables residents and visitors to access Wi-Fi, browse the web, charge their phones, and make domestic calls—all for free. The ten-feet tall kiosks scattered around the city are equipped with screens, cameras, a tablet, speakers, microphones, and 30 different sensors. Almost immediately after its launch, several concerns were raised about LinkNYC: noise complaints concerning users listening to loud music, homeless people gathering around the kiosks, moral outrage regarding users watching pornography, as well as the potential threat to privacy the kiosks present. This paper argues that LinkNYC functions as a neoliberal apparatus of listening and silencing in the public sphere through data gathering practices and restrictions on usage of the kiosk in the name of security, morality and accessibility. Through a cross-disciplinary socio-technological ethnography of LinkNYC, I engage ethnomusicological thinking in current discussions about surveillance. I investigate the marketing strategies of tech companies carried out by utopic discourses, the current political threat of the blurred boundary between public and private interest, the conflicting notions of the public space by historicizing noise containment in New York City, as well as discuss forms of resistance against LinkNYC. Although primarily based on fieldwork, this paper is at the theoretical intersection of sound studies, urban studies, and legal literatures on privacy and data gathering. Through this case study, I demonstrate how power and control circulate through sound, sound politics, and listening practices.

Audrey Amsellem is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Originally from Paris, France, she began her undergraduate studies at community college before transferring to Columbia University to pursue a B.A in Music. She graduated cum laude and received Departmental Honors for her thesis “Songs of Dreams of Mankind” advised by Professor Aaron Fox in 2015, and received her M.A with her thesis, presented today, "The Noise of Silent Machines: A Case Study of LinkNYC,” advised by Professor Ciucci and Professor Washburne. She is currently working on her dissertation of sound and surveillance. Her research interests include: music and property, copyright law, archival practices, politics of access to music, music in the digital age, biopolitics, and decolonial pedagogy.

William Hallett, Erin Cooney/Nire (NYU), and Hannah Tardie, “Bird2Vec and Multiplexed Re-soundings of Death”

Computational media practices which arose through technical and aesthetic post-war experiments under the umbrella term of cybernetics have brought to the fore the enduring concept of emergence. Major scholars across a spectrum of academic fields have tracked emergent phenomena in the study of biosemiotics, affect, cognition, computability, social structure, and complexity. In media studies and computational media, this interdisciplinary image of thought has inspired significant interest in computational simulations and artistic studies of emergence and widespread citations of Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of potentiality. Through this process, however, studies have increasingly equated potentiality to vitality. Potentiality becomes reductively imaged as merely but purely ‘lifeness’; thereby reduced to swarms of potent vitalities that are informed and in economic relations with computational techniques such as noise, randomness, genetic algorithms, machine ‘learning’ and massively produced images of swarms, packs, and flows. Yet, as Foucault, Mbembe, and many critical interlocutors have shown us, images of life are never not bio/necropolitical. By mapping bio/necropoliticized images of life onto potentiality, media studies and computational media practices have totalized emergence as a ‘naturally’ ‘selective’ and ‘adaptive’ phenomenon, thereby erasing both Deleuze’s own philosophical formulation of the negative and - more pressingly - what Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon famously characterized as the evolutionarily dysselected image of the black (in)human in its fabricated opposition to the selected (white) human. In the paper that follows, we analyze Erin Nire’s 2019 artwork “Bird2Vec”, in which she trains deep learning models on archived audio recordings of extinct birds in order to re-render emergence as a complex negotiation with death and as a redux of the objects who scream. We offer this paper as a call to all those sciences of the emergent to unfold death and negation (back) into a multiplexed set of relations inside urbanity and modernity.

Erin Cooney / Nire is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens, NY, working in music/sound, performance, video and new media. She is a recent graduate of NYU Tisch’s ITP masters program where she explored relations of humans and nonhumans: organic and machinic, via an animist and mystical lense. She’s interested in blurring artistic practice, knowledge-sharing spaces and performance. Nire is a recipient of the Red Burns Scholarship, a SUNY Purchase Art+Design scholarship and a participant of the Red Bull Music Academy. Her work can be seen in outlets such as: NPR, Dazed Magazine, Interview, Fader, Conde Naste, and has had contributing work at MoMA PS1, National Sawdust and Marjorie Barrack Museum.

Andy McGraw (University of Richmond), “Mapping Sonic and Affective Geographies in Richmond Virginia”

In this presentation I describe a new music/sound mapping project based in Richmond, Virginia (http://audiblerva.org/map). The historic capital of the confederacy, Richmond’s soundscape is policed by a byzantine assemblage of sound ordinances, zoning, alcohol laws and regulations that emerged from the racialized moral panic of prohibition and which today disproportionately impact African-American communities (57% of the city population). This includes practices of “sonic stop and frisk” by city police: (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmFiAVtL1E&t=3s), and the targeting of black clubs by the state alcohol board. The data produced from these maps is currently being used by the ACLU as part of a civil-rights case against the city. These policies, in combination with historic segregation and redlining, punitive surveillance and mass incarceration generate discontinuous soundscapes across the city that impede possibilities of relational affect across racial divides.

Feld’s influential concept of acoustemology refers to a “. . . knowing with and knowing through the audible,” and while he elaborated this concept to be “. . . aligned with relational ontology,” it is often employed to describe an individual listener’s (usually an academic’s) subjective experience of the local soundscape. That is, acoustemologies are typically framed in the form of a reflexive individualism. In my analysis of the relationship between sound, music, and identity in Richmond I attend to an acoustemology that focuses on collective being. That is, our affective experience of typical situations is based upon what is probable or possible for us (not me) in any particular space and time, as members of particular (racial, cultural, gendered etc.) groups. For instance, hearing a siren in one’s neighborhood is a different affective experience for members of communities that have been traumatized by police violence as compared to those who hear a siren as the arrival of help.

Andy McGraw is an Associate Professor of music at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in 2005 and has published extensively on traditional and experimental music in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Radical Traditions: Re-imagining Culture in Balinese Contemporary Music (2013, OUP) and co-editor, with Sumarsam, of Performing Indonesia (2017, Smithsonian). His current book project, entitled Sounding the Commonwealth, is an ethnography of music as an ethical practice in four communities in Virginia. He leads community gamelan and string-band ensembles in Richmond and facilitates music programs at the local jail and prison.

Ben Assiter (Goldsmiths, University of London), “‘From Bagley’s to Spiritland’: Audiophile Bars and the Gentrification of Listening”

As Marie Thompson (2016) reminds us, ‘gentrification can be heard as well as seen’, and musical spaces represent a highly-contested frontier of the conflicts between displaced and newly emerging urban publics. In this paper, I examine London’s ‘audiophile bars’ as a new category of space in the city, situating their associated practices of listening and sound reproduction in relation to the regulatory and socio-spatial pressures widely faced by urban nightlife scenes. (Hartley 2018) Where most journalistic commentaries have positioned audiophile bars as a ‘slow listening’ reaction to the increasing ubiquity of music in everyday life, I reflect on their rise during a period which has witnessed significant crackdowns on club culture, considering how the static socialities and individualised listening practices promoted at audiophile bars fit more comfortably into gentrified models of the so-called ‘night-time economy’.

Focussing specifically on the heavily regenerated King’s Cross area of London, this paper considers the intertwined social and sonic significance of an audiophile bar, Spiritland, which stands in place of what was once imagined as both an epicentre for rave culture and a ‘symbol of blight’. (Campkin 2013: 116) My paper begins with an interrogation of listening practices at Spiritland, highlighting the tensions between enacted audience behaviours, modes of consumption, and a discourse focussed on transformative sonic experiences. Broadening focus, I go on to situate such tensions in the context of the ‘Coal Drops Yard’ development, whereby loose notions of culture are evoked to ‘offset’ otherwise more overtly commercial imperatives. Considering the restrictive definitions of noise, (anti)sociability and culture that continue to dominate public discussion of the night-time economy, I reflect on what this shift from nightclub to audiophile bar might mean for London’s electronic dance music scenes and night-time culture more generally.

Ben Assiter is a PhD student in the music department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His thesis focuses on London’s electronic dance music scenes and spaces, exploring their relationship to contested notions of the night time as cultural territory, economic category and site of urban governance. Ben is active in these scenes as a DJ and producer, and performs internationally as a drummer.

Austin T. Richey (Eastman School of Music), “Re-Sounding Detroit: Sonic Afro-Modernity in the North End Neighborhood”

Detroit’s North End neighborhood is a musical palimpsest: situated just north of the former Paradise Valley, the city’s once dynamic, now destroyed black entertainment district, the North End was home to blues guitarist John Lee Hooker, gospel singer Aretha Franklin, birthplace of Parliament-Funkadelic, and the site of foundational techno label Submerge Records. Today, the neighborhood’s topography is pocked by abandoned, arson-charred homes, stretches of open land, and demolished businesses. This visual blight is a result of racist strategies of redlining, disinvestment, and “urban renewal.” However, despite its surface appearance, the vibrancy of the North End continues through musical expression.

In my presentation, “Re-Sounding Detroit: Sonic Afro-Modernity in the North End Neighborhood,” I argue that alternative modalities, such as sound studies, offer a new way of understanding the city of Detroit; by tuning in to the acoustic ecology of the North End neighborhood, we reveal that there is more to this space than meets the eye. Further, through the sonic output of the North End’s contemporary black American cultural creators, we find that this community is actively engaged in recreating themselves through collaborative music.

The musical collective Synergistic Mythologies are the sonic historians of the North End. These self-described griots, musical storytellers from West African traditions, perform “ancestral literacy” through free-form improvisations that combine the multiple musical histories of the neighborhood. By redefining the North End through a mix of Detroit and Pan-African musics, the sonic culture creators inscribe themselves within a musical history that is not bounded by temporality or geography. I argue that the sound of Synergistic Mythologies expresses an alternative, Detroit-based African modality which extends Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” into a re-orientated space. Through their production of multiple sonic Afro-modernities (Weheliye 2005), the musicians of North End reimagine what it means to be black in Detroit.

Austin T. Richey is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music. His dissertation research is based in Detroit, Michigan, where he explores the resonances between diasporic African musical, dance, and visual arts and Detroit-specific musical genres, such as Motown and techno. Richey has published original research in African Music, and has forthcoming essays in the Routledge Handbook of Music in the New African Diaspora and Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction. His work is supported by the Frederick Douglass Institute, the Society for American Music, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Presser Foundation.

Elizabeth Bynum (University of Pennsylvania), “Of Neighbors and Nightclubs: The Sonic Formations of Urban Relations in Mexico City”

Mexico City is consistently ranked as one of the world’s loudest cities, and although government institutions have produced new sound regulations in the past decade, citizen noise complaints continue to rise, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods. I consider the conditions that make sound “audible” as an object of concern for specific urban actors and focus on citizen engagements with urban sound, drawing on early-stage dissertation research that examines processes of evaluating and managing sound among Mexico City residents and governmental institutions. Through ethnographic work with residents of the Cuauhtémoc district, I explore how residents in increasingly gentrified neighborhoods listen to, evaluate, and attempt to manage sound. This investigation examines residents’ efforts to control their sonic environment, through street protests, social media campaigns, community WhatsApp threads, and official complaint processes, and considers how those activities assert authority and claim belonging in neighborhoods that continue to change. For example, when residents are concerned about the sounds of mobile vendors (typically understood as lower-income), and sounds from nightclubs catering to elite newcomers, what position do they stake for themselves in their neighborhood? I will consider how engagements with sound may delineate clear sonic “others” that violate residents’ aspirations for community norms and relations, but also produce new relationships between neighbors, and between residents and government. Thinking with urban anthropology, anthropology of bureaucracy, and interdisciplinary sound studies, my paper thinks through initial ethnographic research to ask how sonic management activities may become key modes for articulating urban rights and desires about the present and future of life in Mexico City.

Elizabeth Bynum is a PhD candidate in Music and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research in Mexico City examines how city government institutions and residents differently evaluate, manage, and attempt to control sound, understanding their different activities under the category of sonic management. Relating sonic concerns to anxieties around shared public spaces, gentrification, and social difference, her project considers struggles to document, manage, and contest the city’s sonic environments as struggles to symbolically and materially shape the city.