Social Acoustics
Sounds are deeply relational, enabling gestures of compassion and sharing, as well as disruption and collective volume. In what ways might forms of sonic practice contribute to contemporary social struggles? Are there particular discourses to be drawn from the experiences of audition that may aid in issues of embodiment and community? Might certain affordances be garnered by way of the formulation of acoustic knowledge, particularly to challenge what Isabell Lorey terms “governing through insecurity” prevalent today?
Social Acoustics is an artistic, collaborative research project between the Departments of Contemporary Art and Music, University of Bergen, and is developed through two main strands: Embodiment, led by Jill Halstead, and Community, led by Brandon LaBelle. Social Acoustics focuses on the potentialities of sound’s relational, material and artistic qualities. In particular, the project engages sound as a productive medium for nurturing collaboration and an ethics of radical openness. Moreover, it sets out to raise questions regarding knowledge practices today, following sound as the basis for challenging particular “regimes of knowledge” defined by the visible, the legible and quantifiable. In contrast, by considering sound’s non-representational, temporal, affective and interruptive qualities, the project focuses on nurturing acoustic knowledge, and how this can support practices that help engage contemporary concerns. By positioning sound as a weak object, which allows for situated and embodied sensitivity, as well as greater relational sympathy, social acoustics as a field of research weaves together a number of critical activities. This is diffused around questions of illness and injustice (stemming from a relation to music therapy) along with new modes of collective resistance and well-being (grounded in new cultures of ecological community building). If the norm of crisis and insecurity shapes our experiences of the world today, it becomes imperative to enable conditions of care that may turn vulnerability and precarity into states of possibility.
As Les Back states in his book, The Art of Listening, a “sociological listening” is needed to create a space for the excluded and the marginal, as well as the injured, for those that do not always have a voice. This may be extended to recognize how listening is an everyday practice shaping the ways in which friends and strangers may meet, and acts of hospitality as well as disagreement can occur. As such, the project poses a set of questions as to what constitutes an act of listening, what consequences might sound studies have for research culture and knowledge production, and in what ways may an art of sound instigate alternative modes of being together.
The project integrates a number of regional and international partners, including the Faculty of Psychology (Department of Biological and Medical Psychology), and the Faculty of the Humanities (Department of Philosophy, the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research), as well as the independent spaces and organizations Errant Bodies, Berlin and Klub MaMa, Zagreb.