Music, Sound, and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private Space

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

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