September 2013

Kevin T. Allen

Sep 262013

Kevin T. Allen is a filmmaker, sound artist, and independent radio producer whose work traverses museums, galleries, festivals, and conferences around the globe. He is increasingly fascinated with the territory that straddles ethnography and the avant-garde, disciplines that are both deeply immersed in “the other” and a thick approach to representation. His recent interest in acoustic archeology urges him to locate culture not only in human forms, but also in physical landscapes and material objects. His current project, “Real West,” uses handmade contact microphones to interrogate the material artifacts of roadside ghost towns in South Dakota. As a Part-Time Faculty member at The New School for Public Engagement, he teaches courses in film form, sound studies, and documentary practice. Samples of his work can be found at www.smallgauge.org

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 5:43 pm People Comments Off

Time-Based Documentary

Sep 262013

Kevin T. Allen

NMDS 5434
Fall 2013, Spring 2014
Mondays, 7-9:45pm & Saturdays 12:10-2:45pm (Tech Lab)
Open to All New School Graduate Students

Course Description

In this intensive theory/production course, students learn the tools and techniques of documentary practice for sound and image. Particular attention is paid to how form shapes content, and vice versa. Sound studies plays a crucial role, exploring disciplines such as acoustic ecology and sound ethnography. In addition to the classical documentary form, moving image practices such as found-footage, ethnography, and experimental filmmaking are also covered. Students are trained in field recording, sound editing, digital cinematography, and video editing while assigned a number of short representational problem-solving assignments culminating into an ambitious final project. Sensory training is also very integral to the class through a series of listening and looking exercises, positioning students to be critical observers/producers of their everyday environments.

Posted by Josephine Holtzman at 11:29 am Courses Comments Off

Sound Studies Winter and Summer “school” : Apply Now

Sep 242013

Objectives

The two schools will focus on the notion of “sound signatures” as a way to reconsider sound as a phenomenon that is highly bound to specific media, material cultures, and related discursive systems. It invites graduate students from different disciplines to investigate the connection of sound to particular contexts and fields of action: social, scientific and artistic practices, embodied skills, objects, technologies and media, architectural and environmental designs.

In the early years of sound studies, the terms “acousmatic music” and “schizophonia” (Schaeffer 1966, Schafer 1977) were coined to describe a split between original contexts of sound and their loss of spatial-temporal referents during reproduction. By contrast, recent studies have made significant efforts to ground “soundscapes,” “acoustemologies” and “techoustemologies” in specific historical periods and localities (Thompson 2004, Feld 1996, Porcello 2005). Taking these studies as a starting point, the two schools seek to further investigate how sound – both past and present – have influenced certain environments and discourses, and how these processes have left their marks on the cultural heritage of sound.

The winter school will be held at the University of Amsterdam in January 2014. It will focus in particular on sound-based strategies for the configuration of spaces, objects and embodied practices. The summer school will be held in August 2014 at NYU’s center in Berlin, with a focus on the sonic dimensions of knowledge production.

http://soundsignatures.org/amsterdam-2014/apply-winter/

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Sound Studies Gets Real with first ESSA Conference in Berlin

Sep 242013

On October 4-6, 2013 ESSA – The European Sound Studies Association – will have its first conference in Berlin. This initiative is just the latest sign that an institutionalization is taking place within the inter-disciplinary field of sound studies. Erik Granly Jensen, who is one of the founding members and vice-chair of ESSA, tells the story here:

During the past decade, the field of sound studies – or auditory culture if you will –has been growing immensely. International conferences and seminars, numerous dissertations, monographs and research articles have shaped a vibrant, interdisciplinary area of study that of course has a much longer history within the more traditional disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, but which during the past 10-15 years has morphed into a discipline of its own. Just last year, two extensive collections of theoretical texts appeared with major publishing houses, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (ed. Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld) on Oxford University Press and The Sound Studies Reader (ed. Jonathan Sterne) on Routledge. A second edition of the classicAuditory Culture Reader (ed. Michael Bull) is in the making and supposedly another Routledge anthology is being planned as well. Furthermore, in 2010 three European journals on sound cultures appeared within just a few months: the Holland-based Journal of Sonic Studies, the Ireland-based journal Interference and the Denmark-based SoundEffects; all three of them international online journals devoted to the analysis of sound cultures with an explicit ambition to integrate sound into academic analysis. To give an illustration of the interest that these journals are already enjoying is the fact that SoundEffects in 2012 alone had 15,000 individual article downloads.

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