SOCIAL ACOUSTICS

Seminar #3: Resonant Bodies: Audition, Interaction, Orientation

2020-02-22 - 10:00 AM / NORCE Norwegian Research Center: Nygårdsgaten 112, 5008 Bergen,

Hanne De Jaegher, Christophe De Bezenac, Simon Gilbertson, Jill Halstead  (Moderator), Anna Helle-Valle, Line Horneland, Katja Gottschewski, Struan Leslie, Ragnhild Nabben, Maren Metell, Donna McCormack, Karin Mössler, Katie Overy, Wolfgang Schmid, Sveinung Sundfør Sivertsen, Monika Smetana, Karsten Specht, Xueli Tan

This two-day workshop will explore the relationship between bodies, sound and orientation through questions of audition and resonance. Through dialogues, conversations around audio-visual examples and experiential bodywork the workshop aims to follow the ways resonance creates shared affective and expressive space.

Sound resists conceptions of separateness. Sound moves, it surrounds, it saturates and permeates bodies, objects and spaces creating patterns of resonance which reverberate, elicit and evoke.  As such questions of audition, the power of listening, and resonance form important foundations for understanding the “inter” of our inter-actions, inter-subjectivities and inter-affectivities. In turn the resonant, relational, contagious qualities of sound make audition a process of orientation which shapes who and what we direct our energy and attention toward, and how we inhabit shared social space. 

Taking an embodied approach to listening through what Michel Serres calls mingled bodies which are knotted with each other and the world, the workshop aims to draw on how listening may be expansive, multi-sensory and dynamically co-constituted, rather than only auditory and receptive. The relationship between sound, movement and affect will be a significant case in point raising questions of consubstantiality and how acts of listening may orientate us, compel us to move, be moved and move with others, and how embodied audition may initiate, restore or rupture relational intimacies.