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#soundstudies

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Public
CVBOOKS
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear
Edited and introduced by @Irene_Revell and @Sarah_Shin_

With contributions from:
Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

Paperback Original
Silver Press, November 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7393717-1-5
408 pages, 12.7 x 19.7 cm
@silver.press

Now available at CVBOOKS at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

#artbook #cabaretvoltaire #art #artzines #zines #bookshop #zurich #soundstudies #sound #feminism
#feminism
Public *
Magali Cécile Bertrand

Call for papers
Journal of Alpine research | Revue de géographie alpine

"Mountains as an Amplifier
1.Memory, Construction and Heritagisation of Mountain Sonorities, Ambiances and Soundscapes
2. Sounds as Revealing the Highly Anthropised Nature of Mountain Territories
3.Listening to the Mountains: Stances on Listening and Understanding Sounds"

Article proposals by 1st May 2025

journals.openedition.org/rga/1

journals.openedition.orgThe Sounds of the MountainsThe 1970s saw the emergence of pioneering work on sound and territories in the humanities and social sciences, often using a multidisciplinary approach. The development of this area of research was...
#soundscape#soundstudies#Alps
Public
disquiet

One last note before going quasi-offline for the weekend: I finally found utility in the Obsidian feature called "graph view," which is that I put a ton of my recent #soundstudies news items in and I tagged 'em, and that helped me locate clusters of related information by visualizing connections. Those examples shown here, by the way, are not from this issue but instead from the previous issue.

Public
Andy K S

my review for JPMS of Kyle Barnett's excellent Record Cultures is up online.ucpress.edu/jpms/articl (OA link good for 30 days) #soundstudies #radiostudies

University of California PressReview: Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry, by Kyle BarnettIf asked to explain the Grammy Awards, any of us could be forgiven for saying they recognize achievements in popular music. Most of a Grammy ceremony could roll by without dissuading that notion, until long-down-the-list categories like “Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package” remind viewers that the Grammys, presented by the Recording Academy, have more to do with musical recordings than with music per se. Today, the synonymy between popular music and the recording industry is so entrenched as to seem unremarkable; what musician wouldn’t record their songs in the process of pushing them toward a popular audience? Kyle Barnett’s Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry returns us to a historical moment when industrial actors, including musicians, were still working hard to establish that link. From the mid-1910s through the Great Depression, Barnett guides us through bursts of expansion and experimentation in commercial record production, through moments of strain when the still fragile ties between music distribution and home phonography seemed headed for a full break, and into the post-crisis context in which those ties solidified as part of a media convergence wave. Barnett shows that the emerging recording industry played a key role in establishing lines of genre division that today play as significant a role in structuring popular music as sound recording’s technologies and conventions.Record Cultures is a media industries treatment of American music recording as it developed across the 1920s. Building atop historiographies like David Suisman’s Selling Sounds and Russell Sanjek’s Pennies from Heaven, the book homes in on a cluster of musical, technological, and professional changes that secured sound recording’s place in an American media ecosystem. Barnett’s initial goal is to correct the lack of attention to sound recording in the media industries subfield and in media studies more broadly, where he finds that recorded sound’s ubiquitous supporting status has made it easy to overlook. “Sound recordings have long been both the raw material used by and for other media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an industry all its own, a dual, defining role of lasting importance” (p. 10). This media industry analysis leads to insights that speak directly to popular music studies. Key among them are questions of genre, as well as the warping effect that a simplistic mainstream/margins binary exerts on what might be better called a continual process of capture and redefinition. Barnett claims,Histories of U.S. popular music too often discuss the insurgent genres of jazz, race records, and old-time music as distinct from what we understand as the “popular music” of the era, understood as songs and styles descending from the Tin Pan Alley hits of the 1900s and 1910s. But it is untenable to separate these for several reasons. In addition to the era’s various media convergences, the emerging genres, artists, and songs of the late 1910s and early 1920s were fully part of recording industry logics and practices by the middle of the decade (197).We rely on cultural histories to unseat the apparent fixity of formations like genres, and Record Cultures achieves this to an exciting degree in its first chapters. Barnett shows how each of those three genres (jazz, race records, and old-time) arose in tandem with small record labels’ efforts to capitalize on under-commodified spheres of musical activity. Genre, we see, was not just a product of music’s commodification in the record format but a process that helped ensure its success.It was not predetermined or inevitable that the recording industry would become synonymous with popular music. It was not even inevitable that the industry would survive into the 1930s. The later chapters of Record Cultures delve into a period in which the rapidly ascendant radio medium seemed on track to displace the home phonograph entirely. Economic crisis then threatened to seal that fate. Industry leaders adapted in part by more fully incorporating the sounds, artists, and labels of the once marginal genres Barnett tracks. But Barnett forecloses any Golden Age narrative by arguing that “while the industry’s path from genre expansion in the 1920s to its major companies becoming part of the radio industry is sometimes characterized as an Edenic fall from grace, that narrative misses the larger story detailed here: the reorganization and maturation of the recording industry as a whole” (197).While Barnett does not suggest that any musical genre derived wholly from record production, he is clear in preferring a more practical than stylistic basis for genre. He recognizes the term’s “industrial function [as] a marketing category, shaped and reshaped along the cultural circuit of production, distribution, and consumption” (8). Musicians of course took part in shaping genres, but questions of creative agency multiply in regard to a period when recording was neither a standardized process nor a de facto aim for most musicians. Who determined which bands ended up recording studios in the first place? Who decided which master discs made it on to the pressing stage and how they were paired, circulated, and framed within a label’s release catalog? Tracking the rise of jazz and the Gennett label around the turn of the 1920s, Barnett’s first chapter introduces talent scouts, “record men,” and “jobbers” as amorphous but key roles in determining these questions. In the second chapter’s account of race records, further into the decade and into the industry’s growth, Barnett demonstrates how musicians exerted agency even in the face of stark power differentials including the United States’ deep-set institutional racism. He notes that “[t]hese recordings were highly mediated events, through which performers often fought to be recorded, struggled over repertoire, and negotiated their place within larger societal discourses” (70). Louis Armstrong, Paul Whiteman, Mamie Smith, and Jimmie Rodgers make recurring appearances across chapters, reflecting musical careers that followed and facilitated the record industry’s entanglement with film and radio. By casting these musicians as industrial actors alongside label executives or high-status talent scouts, Barnett makes a compelling case that musicians wielded historical influence beyond direct stylistic innovation.Genre is a key, but not the only, cultural phenomenon that recovers nuance through Barnett’s research. Genre divisions, particularly between race records and old-time or hillbilly music (later rebranded as R&B and country), helped reify divisions along geographic, racial, and class lines that belie complex social histories. Race records came about largely when white-owned labels like OKeh circulated Black musicians’ work to mainly Black audiences. They drew opposition from the Black middle class with marketing materials that often twisted the songs’ subjects into racist caricature. Hillbilly music, meanwhile, nurtured a lasting impression of stark rural/urban contrast that obscured both rural musicians’ savvy and stars’ vaudeville pedigrees. Even record labels’ geographic distribution rejects the industry’s own myth of coastal hubs plucking unpolished talent from deep in the country’s hills and bayous. Many of the labels that positioned jazz, race, and hillbilly records as popular music did so from Midwest offices and recording studios. Barnett is keen to deflate a longstanding authenticity mythos that relies on clean divides between center and periphery. He does so effectively across musical, social, and industrial contexts.Record Cultures’ later chapters feature a dizzying sequence of mergers, buyouts, tie-ups, artist signings, and manufacturing partnerships that played out as the record industry’s flurry of stylistic expansion crashed into the ascendant broadcast radio medium and then into the Great Depression. Barnett catalogs these events to show how the timing and nature of sound recording’s consolidation into larger media companies depended on complex internal pressures and economic factors beyond anyone’s control. By centering musical careers as industrial activity, Barnett produces a richly contextual account of media convergence from which popular music studies, radio studies, and media studies can all benefit. Such perspectives are vital amid media studies’ renewed interest in industrial centralization under today’s platform monopolies. The book furthers radio studies’ contribution to understanding the effects of consolidation on cultural distribution, pointing out a time well before the oft-cited 1996 Telecommunications Act when American sound media’s very definitions hung in the balance of industrial churn. Through Record Cultures, we witness the highly contingent emergence of once marginal genres that persist as structuring lines of difference today. We also see how popular music, through incorporation into the radio-recording industry, became a vehicle for musicians and other workers to wield lasting influence on the conditions of sonic culture’s circulation.
Public
CHSTM Sound & Technology Group

Our next meeting will be on Thursday Feb 15, 11:30am -1:00pm EST on Zoom. We’ll discuss two chapters from You Nakai’s 2021 book on David Tudor, Reminded by the Instruments. Everyone is welcome. More information and Zoom link here chstm.org/content/sound-and-te #DavidTudor, #experimentalMusic, #noise, #SoundSynthesis, #instrumentBuilding, #readingGroup, #soundStudies

www.chstm.orgSound and Technology | Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
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