Sounds are deeply relational enabling gestures of compassion and sharing as well as disruption and cacophony. How might forms of sonic practice contribute to contemporary struggles? Are there particular discourses on embodiment and community to be drawn from the experiences of audition? Might certain affordances be garnered by way of sonic 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. Affiliated with the project is PhD fellow Karen Werner.
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, and for challenging models of knowledge and agency defined by the apparent, the legible and the quantifiable. In contrast, by probing sound’s non-representational, temporal, tonal and interruptive qualities, the project focuses on how sonic practices and discourses may engage illness and injustice as well as nurture new modes of resistance and well-being. 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 will pose a set of questions as to what constitutes an act of listening, what consequences might sound studies have for research culture, 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 Sound, Berlin and Klub MaMa, Zagreb.
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Jill Halstead is a feminist writer, researcher and practitioner. Her publications center on gendered politics of musical creativity and participation, in addition to compositional work and performances often made collaboratively. Since the mid 1990s she has specialized in participatory devised performance projects, often created over short periods of time, on location with various groups and communities. Recent work includes soundscore compositions for a series of screendance pieces and live dance performances addressing questions of embodiment and the social stigmatization of aging and loss. She is Professor at the Grieg Academy, Institute of Music, University of Bergen and leader of the Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies, a consortium of five universities based on the west coast of Norway.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. He is editor of Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, and Professor at the Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen. He develops and presents artistic projects within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making. He is the author of The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2019; 2010), and Background Noise (2015; 2006).