Transhistorical / Intercultural Soundscapes

Abstract

On March 31, 2022, the city of Shanghai was placed under lockdown in accordance with China’s “zero-covid” policy after its old test-and-trace measures failed to contain an escalating outbreak. The latest euphemism for lockdown coined by the municipal government, in Chinese “全域静态管理” (whole area static management), or “静默期” (period of silence) for short, revolved around the character “静” (jing). Literally meaning static, quiet, or calm, the use of 静 implied a shift from mere spatial restrictions on border-crossing movements to a more holistic regulation shushing all kinetic and emotive activities. Amid the months-long humanitarian crisis caused by authoritarian excess and bureaucratic blunders, residents of Shanghai staged numerous protests. Not surprisingly, almost all voicing of discontent was immediately suppressed and censored as soon as its documentation was circulated online. Chinese internet users were left with only silent digital remains of a near audible revolution.

How does authoritarian sonic dominance in urban environments translate into visual design in digital interfaces? What are the sensorial, affective, social, and political potencies of digitally-circulated sound acts in the age of physical isolation? When human bodies are immobilized and anonymized, human voices silenced, and audio-visual contents made ephemeral, how are the physical and digital infrastructures transformed into new sites of creative manipulation as strategies of remembrance and protest? This paper responds to these questions by zooming into two media objects: a video of a “balcony karaoke” in a locked-down housing compound, and “Voices of April,” an audio montage of Shanghai residents’ cries for help. Through close listening and ethnographic fieldwork, I show how sociality and publicness was rerouted through networked sonic intimacy. Examining the circulation, preservation, and creative adaptation of these two videos, I show how public secrecy (Hillenbrand 2020) is displayed and satirized through performative use of sound technologies and intentional aestheticization of gridded surfaces/interfaces of  urban landscape, architectures, and digital platforms. Tracing the political affect and folk archiving efforts of Chinese internet users during Shanghai covid lockdown, this paper follows Eugenie Brinkema’s reformulation of silence as “intensity in suspension” (2011) and proposes ways of listening to silence in a censored, mediated world.

Biography

Fanyi Faye Ma is a second-year Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology whose interests include Sinophone, postcolonial, diaspora, and Asian/Asian American Studies; music and performance in transnational and global China; and religion and vernacular performative practices. She has written about Chinese music ensembles, formation of Asian Americas, and neoliberal multiculturalism in US universities. Her recent work focuses on the different forms of civil defiance in the mediated, censored world of post-socialist China; and Disney costumed characters and fans’ imaginations of enchantment and disenchantment, labor and pleasure in neoliberal China. Faye grew up in Shanghai, China and previously earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College, where she studied Asian Studies, Music, and Religion.

Abstract

Infrastructures reveal forms of political rationality that underlie technological projects and give rise to an apparatus of governmentality. In sensing, “listening in” (Fahmy 2020), and “listening to listening” (Eidsheim 2018) to the city, the urban “acoustic habitus” (Feld 1982) emerges out of the city’s governmentality; it contains ways of listening that define a biopolitical form of “sonic citizenship” (Western 2021). Governance limits one’s acoustic being in urban spaces, crafting an aural monopoly which I call the infrastructural acoustic. In this context, a wave of counter-acoustics emerged from 2003 to 2019 in Hong Kong’s Street space. The clamor spanning from raging roars to unintelligible sounds in public spaces cast the city’s atmosphere as an affective entanglement of  air and bodies during upheavals in the city’s bygone “semi-democratic” spaces. Indeed, call-and response slogans, amplified political speech, protest music, and random sounds that once sounded all manifest the encounter of a “presentness” entangled with the effects of the city’ infrastructure. Insisting on the significance of sound and listening in making sense of the “presentness” in social uproars, the virtual tour and paper study the materiality of the political through air and sound to discuss the forces and attunements in sensing the dynamics between  sounds and infrastructural matter in protest spheres, and the possibilities of the counter infrastructural acoustics before and after the enforcement of National Security Law (Hong Kong).  Field recordings of the (muted) acoustics in Hong Kong’s street spaces and monologues recorded  by Hongkongers are used to study the transforming acoustics. Through “listening in,”  participants virtually soundwalk the juxtaposition of Hong Kong’s “now” and “then,” an  experience shared by many Hongkongers through remembering the collective action in the  bygone protest spaces while performing quotidian practices and being muted at present. 

Biography

Winnie W. C. Lai (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Music, (specializing in (ethno)musicology and sound studies), a Benjamin Franklin Fellow (2018-2022, 2023-2024), a Tarnopol Graduate Fellow (2020-2021), and a Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities (2022-2023) at the University of Pennsylvania, currently based in Philadelphia, U.S.A. and Hong Kong. Her works mainly focus on but are not limited to sonic activism, urban sound, the theoretical juncture of the sonic, listening, space, and bodies, sound studies, performance studies, political theories, and matters of Hong Kong. Winnie experiments with inter-medial methods and field materials to craft out spaces for sensory experience. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled “Sounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces” under the supervision of Professor Jairo Moreno. For more information about Winnie, please visit: https://www.winniesound.info.

Abstract

The arrival of Hindustani music in the west, and the sitar’s prime location within the western audiovisual imaginary, is popularly explained by a “great man” theory that centers the life and collaborations of Ravi Shankar, and his mentorship of The Beatles’ George Harrison. But what material role does the instrument itself play in the emergence of cultural dialogue, appropriation, and exchange? Rock music historians have rightly critiqued western appropriations of Hindustani musical instruments as prototypical examples of orientalism (Said 1978). In this paper I argue that the sitar plays a central role in the western imaginary because rock musicians believe it functions like the electric guitar, but is clearly marked as its exotic counterpart.

As interfaces, both sitar and electric guitar have a history of undergoing modifications in the service of unlocking deepersonic territory and personal expression. Musical instruments are both cultural symbols and practical technical objects, and, as such, can be better socially contextualized by applying methods developed within the discipline of science and technology studies and its notion of the social construction of technology. Technologies and users construct each other within “sociotechnical ensembles.” Thor Magnusson has used the term ergodynamics “to denote the latent potential for expression in instruments and the unique relationship performers have with them: instruments present subjective scope [sic] of resistance and possibilities, yet there are objective properties at play that can be discovered.” (Magnusson 2021).

Magnusson’s notion of “resistance and possibility” describes the practical ease with which rock musicians have interacted with the sitar, and the aesthetics and discourse of both the sitar and electric guitar. The sitar offers guitar players the possibility of deeper bends and more resonant sustains, while resisting assimilation. Attempts to merge the sitar with guitar technology have demonstrated how an instrument can remain an aesthetic idea that transcends wood and wire, a collection of gestures and timbres that have come to represent South Asian. To understand what India means in the western musical imaginary, we must look at the sitar’s travels into western hands, studios, and imaginations.

Biography

Ravi Krishnaswami is a PHD student at Brown University studying how technology, business, and culture intersect in the work of creating music for advertising. He is an award-winning composer and sound-designer for advertising, television, and games, a business owner, and guitarist in NYC’s tribute to The Smiths. His composition work has appeared in the Super Bowl, on networks including ESPN and HBO, and in AAA video game soundtracks such as Fallout and Dishonored. He studies sitar with Srinivas Reddy, and recently premiered works for acoustic instruments and live processing, under the supervision of Lu Wang and Butch Rovan.

Abstract

Ornette Coleman recorded his first orchestral composition, Skies of America, for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra, in April 1972 with David Measham and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). Music critic Richard Williams attended the recording session and described the collaborative atmosphere as discordant and uncomfortable, with several musicians in the orchestra complaining about ‘un-idiomatic’ passages in Coleman’s orchestration. This paper problematizes the LSO’s unusually strong reaction to Coleman’s piece, given that the ensemble regularly performed works in a variety of different experimental styles. I suggest that this collaboration elicited a clash between different philosophies of sound, rooted in the crossover between classical and jazz genre spheres; specifically, conflicting aesthetic presumptions about what it means to sound ‘good’ both as individual instruments, and as a socialized, instrumentalized collective. Zachary Wallmark describes the social agency and divisive potential of sound as an “ethics of timbre” whereby sounds stratify vibrating bodies, connecting individuals to groups according to various unities and oppositions (Wallmark 2016). Coleman and the LSO held conflicting intuitions and aesthetic preconceptions about what it should feel like to be implicated in timbre, or rather, to do timbre together. On one hand, the orchestra operated within a normative Eurological, western-classical aesthetic, rooted in everyone maintaining a hierarchy of focused, homogenous, individual sounds. On the other hand, Coleman’s Skies of America orchestration typified his own Afrological, Harmolodic, timbral aesthetics, in which timbre is experiential and democratic playing on the inherent multiplicity of sounds contained within every sound, and the feelings of sounding togetherness. Coleman explained to Williams that, “It’s not meant to be a symphony orchestra playing … Not that particular sound. It’s just supposed to be the way these instruments sound when they play together” (Williams 2022). Coleman’s approach to orchestration enriches our understanding of how the symphony orchestra has been conceived as an instrumental unit that is paradoxically both heterogenous and homogenous, multiple sounds but also a coherent sound. His collaboration with the LSO exemplifies how a symphony orchestra can adapt to, but also resist, certain ideas about playing (sounding) together that stem from outside the Western classical tradition.

Biography

Luke Riedlinger is a PhD student in Musicology at McGill University. His research focuses on jazz historiography, particularly discourses of jazz as a popular music, and strategies for illuminating and disrupting the racialized and gendered hegemonies embedded in the jazz canon. His recent work looks at the late recordings and disbandment of the John Coltrane Classic Quartet, detailing how different bandmembers understood their evolving membership of the ensemble during this turbulent period through a shared concept of masculinity.