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Journal articles on the topic 'Sonic fiction'
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1
de Oliveira, Pedro J. S. Vieira. "Design at the Earview: Decolonizing Speculative Design through Sonic Fiction." Design Issues 32, no. 2 (2016): 43–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00381.
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This article discusses how Sonic Fiction—a concept developed by cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun—can be regarded as a cogent mechanism with which to develop Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) projects, using subjects of sound, music, and listening as their driving force. Through a dissection of the base premises of sonic fictions, this article aims to expand the perspectives taken so far by SCD projects in order to encompass languages other than those informed by the usual theories, as well as to broaden the spectrum of possibilities for sound-based practices within the field. In doing so, it suggests sonic fiction as a decolonial epistemology for assessing design questions.
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Baker, Jessica Swanston. "Sugar, Sound, Speed." Representations 154, no. 1 (2021): 23–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.154.3.23.
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This essay presents the song “Area Code 869,” an example of a Caribbean genre known as “wilders” or “pep,” as a form of what Kodwo Eshun calls “sonic fiction.” By focusing on sonic bodies as “bodies touched by sound,” the essay suggests that “869” offers a reimagination of the historical relationship between sugar, sound, and speed in the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts, a former British sugar colony.
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Morgan, Ceri. "Sonic Spectres: Word Ghosts in Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter and the Digital Map Project, ‘Fictional Montreal/Montréal fictif’." London Journal of Canadian Studies 33, no. 1 (2018): 40–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.004.
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This article analyzes various ghosts and their connections with the unsaid and said in relation to Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and the digital map project, ‘Fictional Montreal/Montréal fictif’ (Morgan and Lichti, 2016–17). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work on spectres, it suggests that Thien’s novel offers both negative and positive hauntings, by drawing attention to the far-reaching effects of the Cambodian genocide. It goes on to reflect on absence and presence, voice and body in relation to the digital map, which features recordings of authors reading extracts of their fiction set in Montréal. Arguing that ‘Fictional Montreal/Montréal fictif’ performs an interplay between material and imaginary geographies, the article proposes that the map offers the possibility of new conceptualizations of Montréal. In so doing, it argues that both it and Dogs at the Perimeter embrace the potentially utopian aspect of spectrality identified by Derrida. This is due to their encouraging readers to think about our collective responsibilities to each other in a world characterized by mobility and migration.
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DOSSER, MAX. "These Visual Delights Have Sonic Ends." Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 17, no. 2 (2023): 87–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2023.8.
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Through the blending of the science fiction and western genres, the HBO series Westworld explores issues of humanity and agency. These themes are not only played out through the series’ sprawling storylines; they are also encoded in the series’ title sequence. In this essay, I expand Leslie A. Hahner’s concept of affective prolepsis in visuals to audiovisual prolepsis in order to illustrate how the paratextual title sequence visually and musically prepares the audience by encoding the series’ central philosophical questions of what it means to be alive and the role of agency in the conception of humanity. I argue the title sequence attunes the audience to these questions through a visual assembly of a body and a musical foreshadowing of a dance of agency and power struggles. Through considering audiovisual prolepsis, scholars are better able to understand how the intentions of media creators translate—successfully or unsuccessfully—to viewer experience and interpretation.
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Stevenson, Ian. "De Quincey’s acoustemology." SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 4, no. 1 (2014): 130–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/se.v4i1.20484.
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This article reports on a reading of aspects of sound and knowledge in the writings of English essayist Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). The article develops the concept of the sonic effect as it emerges in de Quincey’s sonic aesthetics. This is supported by a summary of de Quincey’s apparent critique of Kantian understanding and judgement as it relates to sound. The historical development of notions of effect contemporary to de Quincey is explored, and the parallels between his use of sound and subsequent sonic design in crime fiction and the development of audiovisual drama in general are considered. Three key sound effects: the knock, the sigh and the solemn wind are developed and analysed by de Quincey and are shown to be part of a unique de Quincian acoustemology. The research in this article formed the initial phase of a larger practice-based research project culminating in a new sound design for a hybrid performance-installation work.
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Norman, Joseph. "‘[…] tentacular invisible mother divine!’: (The) Weird (in) Metal as convergence of sonic extremities and literary margins." Metal Music Studies 5, no. 2 (2019): 225–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/mms.5.2.225_1.
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Weird Fiction is often understood as an unclassifiable fusion of horror, science fiction (SF) and fantasy, and therefore a kind of generically hybridized writing. Here I discuss various parallels between Weird Fiction and music marketed and recognized as ‘extreme metal’, an umbrella term for bands playing in the core styles of black, death and doom metal, and their various offshoots like grindcore and sludge. Analysis of all Weird Metal is beyond the scope of this article, so I focus on artists who achieve Weirdness through the presence and interrelationship of hybridity, numinosity (an overwhelming feeling of majesty) and alterity (radical difference), especially: Wolves in the Throne Room, Howls of Ebb, Portal, A Forest of Stars, Voices and (The Unsearchable Riches of) Void. I also consider how metal relates to the ‘New Weird’, radical developments in traditions of the form, concluding with thoughts on the wider theorization of The Weird.
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March, Lucy. "Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism." Popular Music and Society 44, no. 4 (2021): 479–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2021.1913713.
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Poncarová, Petra Johana. "Spatial and Sonic Monstrosities in William Hope Hodgson’s “The Whistling Room”." AUC PHILOLOGICA 2022, no. 2 (2023): 67–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.38.
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The article focuses on the corpus of tales featuring “Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder” by the British author William Hope Hodgson, an influential figure in the history of horror, fantastic literature, and speculative fiction. Drawing both on classical works of criticism by Tzvetan Todorov and Dorothy Scarborough and on the rather scarce corpus of scholarship devoted to Hodgson himself, the essay analyses the employment of space and sound in “The Whistling Room”.
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O’Flynn, John. "Blurring the line? Music, sound and “sonic gaze” in post-ceasefire Troubles-themed film." Alphaville: journal of film and screen media, no. 27 (July 2, 2024): 223–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.18.
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This article appraises developments in soundtracks of narrative fiction features based on the Northern Ireland Troubles, focusing on selected titles released in the post-ceasefire period that was consolidated by the Anglo-Irish (“Good Friday”) agreement of 1998. It does this with reference to earlier approaches to music and sound for Troubles-themed film, and by drawing on Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s sound-design-is-the-new-score proposition. The article advances “sonic gaze” as a pertinent critical lens through which to complement artistic appraisals of historical and contemporary soundtracks in light of political and colonial contexts and legacies. In comparison to earlier Troubles-themed film, a small number of narrative fiction features from the turn of the twenty-first century propose alternative positions and/or innovations in their overall sound design. Readings of Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998), Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) and ’71 (Yann Demange, 2014) interpret several significant soundtrack developments. These arise from the involvement of popular music producers, notably David Holmes, technological affordances (production and postproduction) and alternative artistic perspectives that interrupted a colonial-anthropological sonic gaze. The article concludes that Hunger comes closest to Liz Greene and Kulezic-Wilson’s theorisations on the integrated soundtrack and on narrative film’s potential for achieving a holistic audiovisual musicality.
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Wierzbicki, James. "Silent Listening." Resonance 1, no. 1 (2020): 60–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.1.60.
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This essay explores how one “listens to”—that is to say, how one takes in, makes sense of, and reacts to—“sounds” that are not really sounds at all but that are simply evocations of sounds served up by the authors of fiction. Although the essay’s conclusions apply to literary sounds in general, the examples on which the essay bases its observations and arguments are drawn—because their affective range is so very, very wide—from the vintage literature of so-called horror fiction. After a discussion of why some instances of scary literary sounds are more potent than others, emphasis is placed on sounds featured in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, writers celebrated for their “aurality” yet whose structural use of sonic imagery—in dynamic patterns in the case of Lovecraft, as markers of plot points in the case of Poe—has hitherto been neglected. Throughout the essay parallels are of course drawn between literary sounds and actual sounds encountered both in the real world and in the fictional worlds of film, television, and radio drama. Readers of the essay are invited to decide for themselves, but it is suggested here that “silent listening”—because it demands creative involvement on the part of its participants—results in a richer aesthetic experience.
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Jue, Melody, Anya Yermakova, Jacob Cram, and Eli Stine. "Invisible Kelp Forest." Plant Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2024): 189–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63845494909712.
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Invisible Kelp Forest: From Smell to Sound is a speculative fiction and an 8-channel sonic composition that explores the possibility that sound is an ideal medium for translating senses of smell, or chemosensation underwater. It invites the listener to smell the kelp forest with their ears, a mode of synaesthesia. We explore the ways that sound and smell can both convey intensity, distance, dispersion, texture and elements of memory that may be specific to particular organisms. We imagine that the olfactory memory of the kelp forest is multiple, linked to what is meaningful for different marine fauna. In a literary narrative that explores the sensations of four different marine organisms, we develop sonic impressions of their chemosensory experiences of the kelp forest in a scientifically-informed manner. Invisible Kelp Forest plays with invisibility in several ways: by denying the listener any visual cues, they must use their imagination to conjure a spatial sense of the kelp forest on their own. We invite listeners to pay attention to the way that listening for smell feels in the body, perhaps deterritorialising the sensorium.
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Brzostek, Dariusz. "Sonic Speculative Fiction: The Residents’ Eskimo and the Electronic (Re)construction of Ethnic Music." Rock Music Studies 8, no. 2 (2021): 136–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2021.1956096.
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Bartira. "Sample packing: especulando futuros sônicos." Arte e Ensaios 30, no. 48 (2025): 282–89. https://doi.org/10.60001/ae.n48.15.
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O que você está prestes a ler é um ensaio poético especulativo de musicologia que vislumbra o fim do áudio, do som organizado; as armadilhas colocadas por aqueles que acumularam poder suficiente para dominar essa disputa pelo tecido sonoro da realidade.Também propõe a prática do sample packing como forma de conexão, troca, inspiração e resistência às estéticas impostas pela indústria do entretenimento. Baseia-se em um podcast de ficção sônica de minha autoria intitulado Countryside Data Grass e se cruzacom o imaginário de uma estória especulativa de Max Alper, publicada na revista Klang. Palavras-chave:Arte sonora. Musicologia urbana. Sampling. Social practice. Arte especulativa. AbstractWhat you are about to read is a speculative poetic musicological essay which envisions the end of audio and organized sound as well as the traps put by those who have hoarded enough power to dominate this dispute for the sonic fabric of reality. It proposes the practice of sample packing as a form of connection, exchange, inspiration and resistance against the aesthetics imposed by the music industry. It’s based on a sonic fiction podcast made by me and which intersects with the imaginary world of a speculative entry published in the magazine Klang. Keywords:Sound arts. Urban musicology. Sampling. Social practice. Speculative art.
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Gleeson-White, Sarah. "Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein, and Film Sound." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 1 (2013): 87–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.87.
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In identifying cinematic qualities—including Eisensteinian montage—in Faulkner's major fiction, scholars have conceived of film as an exclusively visual medium. This essay provides evidence of Faulkner's familiarity with Eisenstein's cinematic praxis by examining the similarities between the novelist's 1934 film treatment of Blaise Cendrars's Sutter's Gold and one that Eisenstein produced in 1930. It then argues that there is a striking continuity between the two treatments in the realm of sound—in particular, the imagining and inscription of film sound. Most surprising is the manner in which Faulkner's sonic experimentalism, clearly influenced by Eisenstein, works its way into the novel on which he was working at the time, Absalom, Absalom!. Informed by screen writing and film-sound technology, Faulkner's high-modernist novel contributes to emerging scholarly interest in the auditory culture of modernism.
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Bowden, Sara. "Not suitable for the easily disturbed: Sonic nonlinearity and disruptive horror in Doki Doki Literature Club!" Soundtrack 11, no. 1 (2020): 7–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00002_1.
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The extent to which disturbing video games incite real-world violence has been a source of intense debate since the late 1990s following school shootings across the United States. In 2017, the release of Team Salvato’s Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC!) signified a major shift in independent game developers’ approaches to creating a violent horror gaming experience: the developers include the use of nonlinear sound (e.g. frequency jumps, non-standard harmony, noise/chaos) and local-level melodic transformations to complicate player immersion. In this article, I argue that the game’s music is one of the greatest sources of horror. The game music in DDLC! works as both an immersive and a disruptive agent that shapes the player’s gaming experience. Though the game is a work of fiction, the emotions and reflections of the player prompted by the violent acts within are real ‐ the player’s experiences of horror, fear and terror are visceral.
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Fernández, Ricardo Andrade. "Dislocating Sounds: The Unsettling Sonorities of the Amazon in William Ospina's El país de la canela." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 57, no. 2 (2023): 245–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a916253.
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Abstract: In this article, I examine the literary sounds of William Ospina's historical fiction, El país de la canela (2008), which retells the story of the 1541-1542 expedition led by Francisco de Orellana along the Amazon River. Exploring the relationship between aural imagery and space in the novel, I argue that sound contributes to dislocating the outsiders within the jungle, and building an alternative account of history in which senses act as an unstable counterpoint to the lettered archive. I maintain that Ospina re-elaborates the colonial past from a decentered perspective that challenges the primacy of the imperial gaze and rhetoric on the conquest, to criticize the enduring extractivist view of American nature in (neo)colonial discourse. To analyze the narrative's literary soundscape, I study the network of drums, howls, shrieks, rumbles, and silences that can be 'heard' by the mind's ear of its readers in relation to the Amazonian space. Following an interdisciplinary method, I draw on theoretical debates on historical fiction (Menton, Perkowska), eco-critical approaches on the novela de la selva (Marcone, Wylie), and contributions from the sound studies field (Ochoa Gautier, Estévez Trujillo, Kane). This all lends to my claim that the appeal to sounds in the narrative underpins a decolonial retelling of the past ruled by the senses, in which sonic disruptions make the conquistador appear out of place in the rainforest.
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Fernández Jiménez, Mónica. "Invisible or inaudible? The representation of working-class immigrants in the short fiction of Junot Díaz." Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 11, no. 1-2 (2021): 27–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fict_00034_1.
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In Junot Díaz’s short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), sound plays a crucial role in the representation of the experiences of the Dominican migrants in the United States who populate their pages. The collections show the liminal situations which the stories’ characters face, emphasizing their shifting acoustic environments and the pressure to shape one’s own sonic identity to meet the demands of the new language and culture. The experiences of these Dominican migrants – particularly how they are targeted by the Americans they encounter because of their accents – reflect the politics of a cultural neo-racism which differs from the discourse of colonial Otherness but which bears the same monocultural logic. As such, the stories’ migrants become silenced rather than invisible. At the same time, a belief in the power of the Other’s personal and culturally specific voice as a transformative element is emphasized in these collections with Díaz’s use of Spanish and the narrator’s persistent presence throughout all of the stories.
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Reynolds, David S. "Deformance, Performativity, Posthumanism." Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 1 (2015): 36–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2015.70.1.36.
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David S. Reynolds, “Deformance, Performativity, Posthumanism: The Subversive Style and Radical Politics of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 36–64) The most interesting American example of the genre known as city-mysteries fiction, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844–45), while rich in characters, stymies the novelistic stability conventionally provided by the struggles of heroes against villains in the mystery genre. Lippard’s style thus gets foregrounded as the locus of morality and politics, displaying an acerbic, presurrealistic edge. The current essay surveys linguistic and generic deformations (alinear narrative, irony and parody, bizarre tropes, performativity, and periperformativity) and biological and material deformations (posthuman images, including animals, objects, sonic effects, and vibrant matter) in The Quaker City to suggest how Lippard stylistically reinforces his goal of satirizing literary and social conventions and of exposing what he regards as hypocrisy and corruption on the part of America’s ruling class.
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McCartney, Andra. "Alien intimacies: hearing science fiction narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp's Cricket Voice (or ‘I don't like the country, the crickets make me nervous’)." Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 45–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1355771802001073.
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This paper discusses listener responses to a contemporary soundscape composition based on the sound of a cricket. Soundscape composers make works based on everyday sounds and sound environments, usually recorded by themselves (Truax 1984, 1996). While the composer of this piece aims to bring listeners closer to the sounds around them by creating audio pieces based on these sounds (Westerkamp 1988), some listeners feel fear and anxiety rather than the heightened closeness and understanding that she wishes listeners to experience. I compare the sound structure of Cricket Voice with close listening to excerpts of the film soundtrack of Ridley Scott's Alien as well as a short excerpt from the soundtrack of the X Files, discussing how science fiction film and television soundtracks index sonic intimacy with different intent from that of Westerkamp, and raising questions about how such approaches to intimacy might simultaneously reflect and intensify urban anxieties about the sounds of ‘alien’ species that are associated with wilderness environments.
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Morgenstern, Naomi. "Gift or Weapon? Reproductive Decision, the Phenomenology of Pregnancy, and Alien Language in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival." Camera Obscura 38, no. 1 (2023): 103–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278614.
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Abstract This essay analyzes Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film, Arrival, and elucidates its strikingly original meditation on the ethics of reproduction and the relationships between and among embodied maternal subjectivity, language, and temporality. Drawing on deconstructive theories of language and relationality as well as on the writing of scholars working at the intersection of reproductive biology and feminist philosophy, the essay argues that Arrival uses some of the generic features of science fiction cinema (alien encounter and time travel) to articulate a feminist and posthumanist philosophy of relation and care. Focusing on the film's language of risk, danger, contamination, and even social disintegration, Arrival prompts us to consider how a particularly suggestive account of the maternal-fetal relationship, and of the process of fostering and becoming a relationally determined being, simultaneously engages with the fraught question of reproductive choice and reproductive justice in our contemporary moment. Meditating on the film's visual, sonic, and conceptual representations of the “placental wall” and of the “parasitical” structure of pregnancy, the essay shows how Arrival parallels feminist readings of the materiality of pregnancy that deconstruct the self-possessed or “virile” subject of patriarchal individualism.
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Blaszkiewicz, Jacek. "Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret." 19th-Century Music 45, no. 2 (2021): 147–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2021.45.2.147.
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Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.
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Hanlon, Christopher. "Whitman’s Atlantic Noise." Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 2 (2015): 194–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.194.
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Christopher Hanlon, “Whitman’s Atlantic Noise” (pp. 194–220) This essay considers Walt Whitman’s “A Word Out of the Sea,” from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, for its aural qualities—acoustically twittering birds, the hissing “undertone” of the ocean, for example—linking the poem to a wider antebellum interest in the electronic noise of telegraphy. I argue that this poem’s auditory effects bring Whitman into discussion with many others during the 1850s and 1860s who were interested in the sonic qualities of telegraphic noise quite apart from the words those noises encoded. Calling upon an array of cultural documents including songsheets, poems, fiction, and technical commentary, I suggest that “A Word Out of the Sea” condenses a singular moment in American intellectual life wherein the widespread deployment of telegraphic technology honed much interest in the interplay of sound and meaning. In this way, “A Word Out of the Sea” helps further current discussions over the resonance of nineteenth-century information technology among U.S. commentators (including poets), first-generation users who were less constantly focused than we might suppose upon the epistemological ramifications of the telegraph as a harbinger of unthinkably efficient, global communication. In many other ways, these observers of the telegraph were just as struck by the telegraph’s ontological properties, and especially the kinds of sounds it generated.
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PROCK, STEPHAN. "Strange Voices: Subjectivity and Gender in Forbidden Planet’s Soundscape of Tomorrow." Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 3 (2014): 371–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196314000248.
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AbstractAs the first Hollywood film to employ an all-electronic score, Forbidden Planet (1956) helped cement the association of science-fiction films with electronically produced sounds and music. While sounds lacking real-world referents were crucial for representing sonically the nature of fantastic objects and beings, Louis and Bebe Barron's soundscape also had to serve the more conventional musical demands of narrative cinema where music sets mood and atmosphere and creates the illusion of character subjectivity. This double function of their “electronic tonalities,” however, engendered a strange ambiguity in the film's sonic ontology. In this article, I examine how the practical and aesthetic issues arising from this ambiguity forced the Barrons to confront in their score a complex of intertwined musical and cultural messages: how electronic music evokes notions of the exotic Other; how conceptions of vocality and embodiment in their music intersect with other visual and narrative elements to illuminate a gendered divide among envoiced bodies in the film; and how music in the film evolves to illustrate and posit a threat to the male body and, thus, masculinity itself—only in order, ultimately, to restore and reassert conventional patriarchy and the primacy of male subjectivity. As I argue, by using modernist methods and materials to serve a conventionally populist representational form, the Barrons effectively exposed some of the deep underlying tensions and contradictions within modernism itself, even while revisioning fundamental aspects of the Hollywood film score.
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Harper, Adam. "Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism. By Macon Holt. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 208 pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-4666-8." Popular Music 39, no. 3-4 (2020): 724–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143020000690.
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Garcez, Matias Corbett. ""In the Street There Will Only Be Black and White": A Cultural Studies Analysis of Gil Scott-Heron's Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue." Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies I (June 20, 2024): 61–80. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13313195.
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The 1970 album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue </em>contains a host of themes that would appear quite often throughout the artist’s, Gil Scott-Heron, vast discography, such as structural racism, police brutality, economic disenfranchisement, and political corruption. At the same time, it also incorporates and transforms different musical cultures, such as jazz, blues, and spoken word poetry. In it, Scott-Heron creates a powerful narrative that still resonates with the lives and experiences of marginalized voices and communities today. The form of his work, the way he makes use of themes, tones, imagery, symbols, and styles, that mix through a provocative poetics, is interpreted vis-à-vis different domains of social formation, such as the political and cultural upheavals that happened throughout the sixties in the United States. Much like the socio-cultural atmospheres of the time, there is a sense and atmosphere of immediacy, rawness, and brutality in the album. Through his graphic imagery coupled with savvy and witty social commentary, he exposes American society and praises Black communities' resilience and resistance. This research paper explores some cultural and musical aspects of Gil Scott-Heron's seminal album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em>, through a critical perspective of cultural studies. It discusses Scott-Heron’s usage of spoken word in the album as a form of cultural expression and resistance, as sonic fiction. The research highlights the interconnectedness of politics, culture, and identity in <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em> by analysing some of its songs. I discuss how Scott-Heron's lyrics reflect broader sociocultural and political critiques of the time. Finally, the analysis discusses the album’s relevance to contemporary cultural discourse by analysing its significance for better understanding certain structures of contemporary cultural identity and social activism.
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Garcez, Matias Corbett. ""In the Street There Will Only Be Black and White": A Cultural Studies Analysis of Gil Scott-Heron's Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue." Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies 1, no. 1 (2024): 61–80. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13748413.
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The 1970 album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue </em>contains a host of themes that would appear quite often throughout the artist’s, Gil Scott-Heron, vast discography, such as structural racism, police brutality, economic disenfranchisement, and political corruption. At the same time, it also incorporates and transforms different musical cultures, such as jazz, blues, and spoken word poetry. In it, Scott-Heron creates a powerful narrative that still resonates with the lives and experiences of marginalized voices and communities today. The form of his work, the way he makes use of themes, tones, imagery, symbols, and styles, that mix through a provocative poetics, is interpreted vis-à-vis different domains of social formation, such as the political and cultural upheavals that happened throughout the sixties in the United States. Much like the socio-cultural atmospheres of the time, there is a sense and atmosphere of immediacy, rawness, and brutality in the album. Through his graphic imagery coupled with savvy and witty social commentary, he exposes American society and praises Black communities' resilience and resistance. This research paper explores some cultural and musical aspects of Gil Scott-Heron's seminal album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em>, through a critical perspective of cultural studies. It discusses Scott-Heron’s usage of spoken word in the album as a form of cultural expression and resistance, as sonic fiction. The research highlights the interconnectedness of politics, culture, and identity in <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em> by analysing some of its songs. I discuss how Scott-Heron's lyrics reflect broader sociocultural and political critiques of the time. Finally, the analysis discusses the album’s relevance to contemporary cultural discourse by analysing its significance for better understanding certain structures of contemporary cultural identity and social activism.
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Garcez, Matias Corbett. ""In the Street There Will Only Be Black and White": A Cultural Studies Analysis of Gil Scott-Heron's Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue." Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies 1, no. 1 (2024): 61–80. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14674637.
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<strong>Abstract:</strong><em> </em>The 1970 album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue </em>contains a host of themes that would appear quite often throughout the artist’s, Gil Scott-Heron, vast discography, such as structural racism, police brutality, economic disenfranchisement, and political corruption. At the same time, it also incorporates and transforms different musical cultures, such as jazz, blues, and spoken word poetry. In it, Scott-Heron creates a powerful narrative that still resonates with the lives and experiences of marginalized voices and communities today. The form of his work, the way he makes use of themes, tones, imagery, symbols, and styles, that mix through a provocative poetics, is interpreted vis-à-vis different domains of social formation, such as the political and cultural upheavals that happened throughout the sixties in the United States. Much like the socio-cultural atmospheres of the time, there is a sense and atmosphere of immediacy, rawness, and brutality in the album. Through his graphic imagery coupled with savvy and witty social commentary, he exposes American society and praises Black communities' resilience and resistance. This research paper explores some cultural and musical aspects of Gil Scott-Heron's seminal album, <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em>, through a critical perspective of cultural studies. It discusses Scott-Heron’s usage of spoken word in the album as a form of cultural expression and resistance, as sonic fiction. The research highlights the interconnectedness of politics, culture, and identity in <em>Small Talk at 125th and Lenox Avenue</em> by analysing some of its songs. I discuss how Scott-Heron's lyrics reflect broader sociocultural and political critiques of the time. Finally, the analysis discusses the album’s relevance to contemporary cultural discourse by analysing its significance for better understanding certain structures of contemporary cultural identity and social activism.
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Hayes, Tracy. "Aural disturbance in the stories of M. R. James." Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 11, no. 1-2 (2021): 111–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fict_00039_1.
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The physical process of receiving and interpreting sound creates not just an auditory experience through vibrations registering within our bodies; sounds can also evoke feeling and conjure up mental images. This is especially true of acousmatic sounds, which Michel Chion describes as sounds that are heard while their source remains invisible, and such sounds are thus perfect vehicles for conveying one feeling in particular: terror. If one is not able to see what one can hear, the ensuing sense of terror is heightened. Through the use of sound, and indeed the deliberate absence of sound, M. R. James, I would like to argue, is able to concoct in his stories an atmosphere of malevolence, in which his ‘executors of unappeasable malice’ (as Michael Cox describes them) are often heard rather than seen. This emphasis on sound over image, and the manipulation of it, can be traced back to the fact that James was an oral storyteller before he was a writer of fiction, and that his tales were originally intended for a listening audience. A linguist with an ‘ear’ for language and an aptitude for mimetic brilliance, James deploys alien soundscapes and aural disturbance to create sound as a tangible element within rich sonic tapestries that feature unique aural signatures and instances of acoustic chaos. Drawing on the work of David Hendy on ‘the primalness of the auditory’, Leigh Schmidt on ‘sound corporeality’, and Jonathan Sterne on ‘acoustic culture’, this article demonstrates how James utilized auscultation (or the act of listening) to promulgate terror through auditory images as elusive shape-shifters.
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Christodoulou, Chris. "Haunted Science: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the lost futures of hauntological music." Scene 6, no. 2 (2018): 107–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/scene_00012_1.
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This article will explore the particular sense of nostalgia evoked by the sound and music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for a utopian future that has been irrevocably lost; a future contextualized in Britain by the post-war consensus and its attendant narratives of public service broadcasting, state planning and benevolent social engineering. I examine the relationship between the workshop’s output and the contemporary cultural experience Mark Fisher defined as ‘hauntology’, before investigating the workshop’s influence on the hauntological music of contemporary artists who use radiophonic sounds to recover a sense of the future lost as a result of the political and economic transformation of Britain which followed the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and which would eventually lead to the decommissioning of the workshop itself in March 1998. In addition, this article considers the workshop’s idiosyncratic output in relation to electronic dance music which, until recently, had been considered at the vanguard of musical futurism. However, in contrast to electronic dance music, ‘sonic hauntology’ looks to the past for its engagement with the ideas about the future; in particular, the technological optimism associated with the post-war modernization of Britain, such as the belief in a paternalistic, yet benevolent state and in the progressive application of technology. In these ways, hauntological musicians place considerable significance on the sounds, music and other cultural signifiers encountered through the workshop’s productions, such as the use of analogue media, public information films, and science fiction and horror programmes, from the period in which BBC broadcasting dominated the British media landscape.
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Swinney, Warrick. "Houses on Fire: The Hauntologies of Sankomota." Kronos 49, no. 1 (2023): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2023/v49a3.
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The following essay is part of a body of work titled Signal to Noise: sound and fury in (post)apartheid South Africa. These are a collection of creative non-fiction essays set against the backdrop of my involvement with a small, independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg between 1983 and 1997. The metaphor of a drowning signal, pushing through and making itself heard above the noise, resonates throughout the collection. The complexities of the political versus artistic nature of what we were involved with provide a setting for an anecdotal approach to what is part history, part biography, part memoir and part theoretical sonic exploration. The following essay falls into this approach and is constructed from memories enhanced by diaries, scrap-books, shards of notes, lyrics, photos and conversations. These have been employed in reconstructing a narrative arc that covers the recording of the first album made by the band Sankomota, who were banned from entry into South Africa and were based in Maseru, mostly playing to audiences at one of the leading hotels. Sankomota, then called Uhuru, experienced extraordinary, almost metaphysical, peaks and troughs throughout their nearly thirty-year existence hence the hauntological device in the title. The record was also the first made in our fledgling mobile studio using newly affordable equipment that kickstarted many such do-it-yourself projects worldwide. This was the first in a steady stream of technologies that would eventually break the hegemony of mainstream record companies. In apartheid South Africa, this was hugely significant, as being able to sideline the censorship of state-owned media enterprises meant immense freedom in the kind of projects one came to consider. Savage incidents of force and brutality were still common then, and our small venture has to be seen in the context of broader unrest and suffering. Frank Leepa was an uncompromising survivor. His words and melodies still move and inspire a younger generation.
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Nieto, Sonia. "Symposium: Fact and Fiction: Stories of Puerto Ricans in U.S. Schools." Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 2 (1998): 133–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.68.2.d5466822h645t087.
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Puerto Rican communities have been a reality in many northeastern urban centers for over a century. Schools and classrooms have felt their presence through the Puerto Rican children attending school. The education of Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools has been documented for about seventy years, but in spite of numerous commissions, research reports, and other studies, this history is largely unknown to teachers and the general public. In addition to the research literature, a growing number of fictional accounts in English are providing another fertile avenue for understanding the challenges that Puerto Ricans have faced, and continue to face, in U.S. schools. In this article, Sonia Nieto combines the research on Puerto Rican students in U.S. schools with the power of the growing body of fiction written by Puerto Ricans. In this weaving of "fact" with "fiction," Nieto hopes to provide a more comprehensive and more human portrait of Puerto Rican students. Based on her reading of the literature in both educational research and fiction, Nieto suggests four interrelated and contrasting themes that have emerged from the long history of stories told about Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools: colonialism/resistance, cultural deficit/cultural acceptance, assimilation/identity, and marginalization/belonging. Nieto's analysis of these four themes then leads her to a discussion of the issue of care as the missing ingredient in the education of Puerto Ricans in the United States.
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Panourgia, Eleni-Ira, and Guillaume Dupetit. "Sonic Fictions: Shaping Collective Urban Imaginaries through Sound." International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts 16, no. 4 (2021): 35–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2326-9960/cgp/v16i04/35-48.
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Zuberi, Nabeel. "Is This The Future? Black Music and Technology Discourse." Science Fiction Studies 34, Part 2 (2007): 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1525/sfs.34.2.283.
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As a dispersed assemblage of ideas and aesthetics, sonic Afrofuturism operates across the porous borders between and among music, sf, the academy, journalism, and the blogosphere. In this article I am interested in the value of these rhetorics for media studies. In particular, how can writing that focuses on the materiality of music inform our understanding of the technological changes associated with digitization? I will argue that music forms, commodities, and practices provide ample evidence of the continuities as well as discontinuities in the mediascape. Today’s popular music culture is marked by the mediations of the past, even as recorded sounds take on more informational characteristics. I also seek to ground the technological sublime of Afrofuturist poetics in the widespread social practices associated with records, sound-system dances, and music networks. Underpinning the sonic imagination in techno-centric writing and music-making are the quotidian practices of music cultures, the more “worldly” fictions behind “sonic fictions,” to borrow Kodwo Eshun’s suggestive adaptation of literary and visual sf for music recordings. This paper examines the material possibilities of techno-discourse for transnational media studies through a discussion of digital sampling, and points to the limitations of technological utopianism in relation to writing about music and black bodies.
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Nyong'o, Tavia. "Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies after the Millennium." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2014): 173–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2739938.
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Cascone, Kim. "Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction Quartet Books, 1998, 222 pages, softcover, bibiography, discography, acknowledgments, index, ISBN 0-7043-8025-0; available from Quar-tet Books, 27 Goodge St., London W1P 2LD, UK; World Wide Web www.interlinkbooks.com." Computer Music Journal 24, no. 1 (2000): 88–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/comj.2000.24.1.88.
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Ayers, William R. "Scoring, Sounding, and Silencing Death: Musical Depictions of Failure in Coherent and Incoherent Worlds—Part 1." Music and the Moving Image 17, no. 2 (2024): 35–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/19407610.17.2.03.
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Abstract The sounds and music that accompany moments of death in video games frame our understanding of the fictional worlds represented. Using (in part) ideas from game studies, music theory, and music cognition, this article examines how the notion of coherent and incoherent worlds (Juul) interacts with musical and sonic representations of death in video games.
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Abreu Mendoza, Carlos. "Sound, Noisy Feelings, and the Audible Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Latin America." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 57, no. 3 (2023): 403–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a924206.
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Abstract: This article delves into the aural dimensions of Latin American literary tradition, exploring those instances when the sublime provides the vocabulary and syntax to textually inscribe sonic phenomena. As highlighted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the audible techniques cultivated by lettered elites found a way into their writing, thus forming a rich textual archive where they registered sounds, voices, and noises that often defied classification and overwhelmed the senses. In reading texts for sounds that emphasize adversity, discordance, and sono-racial designations, this article traces the sort of negative emotions characterizing Edmund Burke's and later theorists' definitions of the sublime as a combination of pleasure and pain, a negative moment of disturbance and confusion. Focusing on the sonic features of political writings by Simón Bolívar and foundational fictions such as Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva (1837) and Jorge Isaacs 's María (1867) , this article illustrates how sound shapes the discursive articulation of defining binaries such as civilization-barbarism, reason-emotion, nature-culture, and mind-matter.
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Zelnick, Sharon. "American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity by Sonia Weiner." Studies in the Novel 52, no. 2 (2020): 226–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2020.0016.
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Parandhama, Aruna, and Hutulu Dasai. "Rahul Soni (Ed.), Valli: A Novel. Sheela Tomy, Translated by Jayasree Kalathil, India: Harper Perennial India, 2022. 407 pp. ISBN: 9789356290167." Southeast Asian Review of English 60, no. 2 (2023): 191–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.22452/sare.vol60no2.13.
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The debut book of Malayalam author Sheela Tomy, Valli: A Novel, was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022 and is a contribution to the expanding body of Indian eco-fiction. Jayasree Kalathil translated the book into English. Valli is similar to other eco-fictional works from the South-Western region of India by authors like Na D'Souza's Dweepa: Island (2013), Pundalik Naik's The Upheaval (2002), and Akkineni Kutumbarao's Softly Dies a Lake (2020) in that it treats the land as a living entity throbbing with life. The hardships of rural communities, steeped in tradition, mythology, and unwritten norms governing how they should handle the environment as they attempt to navigate the hurdles of modernization, are central to all of these stories. However, Tomy takes her poetic and artistic descriptions of the landscape a step further by utilising the literary device of pathetic fallacy throughout the book. The author alludes to the Wayanadan people's spiritual interconnectedness to and dependency on the land by foregrounding the hamlet of Kalluvayal, the river Kabani, and the flora and fauna of Wayanad before she speaks about its residents and their worries.
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Murray, Sarah. "The Radio Made Betty." Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (2015): 46–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.46.
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Scholarly histories of Betty Crocker in the United States present the fictional General Mills character as a model home economist of the domestic science movement and the foremost illustration of midcentury “live trademark” consumer marketing. Yet it was the medium specificity of radio, and the sonic and nonsonic qualities of disembodiment required to sustain a live trademark, that solidified Betty's place in women's home service programming. Betty Crocker's on-air persona is underexplored and formative in the history of golden-age radio. How did radio make Betty, and how did Betty make radio? This article uses archival documents, listener mail, and surviving broadcasts to build a historiography of a distinctly sonic brand. While the on-air Betty Crocker was a cheerful purveyor of homemaking advice, backstage was a concentrated labor force of real women sustaining a radio-dependent brand identity through the aural, written, and physical personification of a beloved national figure.
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Pinheiro, Sara. "Acousmatic Foley: Son-en-Scène." International Journal of Film and Media Arts 7, no. 2 (2022): 125–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v7.n2.07.
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“Acousmatic Foley” is practice-based research on sound dramaturgy stemming from musique concrète and Foley Art. This article sets out a theory based on the concept of “son-en-scène”, which forms the sonic content of the mise-en-scène, as perceived (esthesic sound). The theory departs from the well-known features of a soundscape (R. M. Schafer, 1999) and the listening modes in film as asserted by Chion (1994), in order to arrive at three main concepts: sound-prop, sound-actor and sound-motif. Throughout their conceptualization, the study theorizes a sonic dramaturgy that focuses on the sounds themselves and their practical influence on film's story-telling elements. For that, it conveys an assessment of sound in film-history based on the “montage of attractions” and foley art, together with the principles of acousmatic listening. This research concludes that film-sound should be to sound designers what a “sonorous object” is to musique concrète, albeit conveying all sound’s fictional aspects.
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Birkenmaier, Anke. "Valeria Luiselli's Desierto sonoro and the Sonic Registers of the Novel." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 57, no. 3 (2023): 519–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2023.a924211.
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Abstract: Desierto sonoro (2019), Valeria Luiselli's first novel written in English and published both in English and Spanish translation, has been read by critics as an anglophone novel of "sentimental activism" (David James), with focus on the literary representation of an ongoing refugee crisis of children migrating across the southern border of the United States. This essay argues that the multiple archival registers of the novel—listening and recording devices as well as books, notes, photographs—suggest a hemispheric dimension, enabling a reading of the novel situated both in the Latin American tradition of archival fictions as well as the Anglo-American modernist tradition. As a modernist novel written in a densely poetic style, Desierto sonoro is concerned with inhabiting a past always already mediated by other texts, music, and images; as a Latin American novel, its concern is with the critique and retelling of foundational myths, embodied in storytelling and the realist tradition of Latin American writing. As such, through a deployment of different registers of experience, this novel challenges readers to think of archives as depositories of both written history and oral storytelling.
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Monrós Gaspar, Laura. "Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)." ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies, no. 45 (October 14, 2024): 11–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.45.2024.11-30.
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News of the discoveries of natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, artificial grottos opened regularly for the entertainment of the public and were commonplace in the cultural and literary products of the period. In this article, I analyse neo-Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Overall’s and Fox’s novels illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as counter-spaces of emplacement that enable heterochronic forms of resistance.
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Pelayo Sañudo, Eva. "American Migrant Fictions. Sonia Weiner. Leiden: Brill: Rodopi, 2018, 243 pages." Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, no. 31/1 (October 2022): 141–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.7311/0860-5734.31.1.08.
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Pinheiro, Sara. "Acousmatic Foley: Son-en-Scène." International Journal of Film and Media Arts 7, no. 2 (2022): 125–48. https://doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v7.n2.07.
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“Acousmatic Foley” is practice-based research on sound dramaturgy stemming from <em>musique concrète</em> and Foley Art. This article sets out a theory based on the concept of “son-en-scène”, which forms the sonic content of the mise-en-scène, as perceived (esthesic sound). The theory departs from the well-known features of a soundscape (R. M. Schafer, 1999) and the listening modes in film as asserted by Chion (1994), in order to arrive at three main concepts: sound-prop, sound-actor and sound-motif. Throughout their conceptualization, the study theorizes a sonic dramaturgy that focuses on the sounds themselves and their practical influence on film's story-telling elements. For that, it conveys an assessment of sound in film-history based on the “montage of attractions” and foley art, together with the principles of acousmatic listening. This research concludes that film-sound should be to sound designers what a “sonorous object” is to <em>musique concrète, </em>albeit conveying all sound’s fictional aspects.
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Lo, Yun-Kiu. "Idols Living in the Virtual." Journal of Sound and Music in Games 6, no. 2 (2025): 96–121. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsmg.2025.6.2.96.
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Millions of international viewers enjoy live streams by the latest form of virtual idols on YouTube—VTubers (virtual YouTubers). VTubers acquire a Japanese anime-style “skin” accompanying fictional lore, while their real-life faces and identities are hidden away from the audience as an untouchable taboo. They sing and dance on the streaming platform, using personae that are often pre-designed before their debuts. Despite their exclusive virtual nature, VTubers are indeed conceived to be “real” and authentic. This paper frames VTubers as a type of virtual idol, where their business revolves around the creation and circulation of personae with musical performances, such as utawaku streams (online live karaoke sessions), serving as an important site for VTubers to shape their personae and engage with their fans. This research involves participant observation on YouTube and relevant social media platforms, alongside interviews with eleven individuals in the industry, including VTubers, managers, and founders of idol agencies. Through a case study of an utawaku session by Shirogane Noel, a popular VTuber with nearly two million subscribers, the paper explores the emerging trend of virtual idols, the role of music and sound in the virtual realm, and the creation and perception of sonic performances under strict anonymity. More importantly, it offers a new way of understanding persona and identity in virtual environments, where they often overlap and interweave. By considering VTubers as a result of collaborating, or “co-op,” between rigging technologies, the Japanese idol business, and the audience in the play, this paper argues that sonic and musical performances effectively humanize fictional characters and authenticate VTubers’ personae in the digital realm across multiple layers.
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Poliks, Marek. "Joshua Fineberg - Joshua Fineberg: Sonic Fictions. Talea Ensemble, Pascal Contet, Arditti Quartet, Argento Chamber Ensemble. Métier: msv28564." Tempo 73, no. 287 (2018): 110–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298218000797.
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Biano, Ilaria. "Baelo-Allué, S. and Calvo-Pascual, M. (Eds.) (2021). Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative." Journal of Posthumanism 3, no. 1 (2023): 81–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.33182/joph.v3i1.2907.
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The basic tenet through which Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual frame their edited collection is the conviction that the world emerged from four consecutive and relatively quick industrial revolutions have been profoundly shaped by the technological development, and exponential growth determined by that processes. And the way that shaping has acted on culture, society, and people can be – and has been – understood both “as marks of progress or as processes of dehumanization” depending on how we conceive “progress and being human” (p. 1). The perspective we adopt to read the world and its processes determines the valuation of those processes. As basic and obvious as this consideration may seem, it actually has a lot of value when touching the subjects this edited collection aims at analyzing through contemporary fiction.
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Skjerseth, Amy. "Podcast Reenactments and the Sonics of Fictionalization from Cher to Swift." Journal of Popular Music Studies 35, no. 4 (2023): 34–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.4.34.
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Podcasts often blend journalistic investigation with personal reflection, from Serial to Switched on Pop. Their veneer of fiction-as-fact especially confounds representation when podcasts’ voice acting and sound design portray pop stars in caricatured dramatizations. This paper examines reenactments of Cher and Taylor Swift in podcasts that investigate popular music industries and technology. As I show, these stars often are ventriloquized on podcasts due to their respective ages and visibility as women. Podcasts interrogate them for being too old or too young and for trespassing onto the often-male domains of business and technology. To show how podcast hosts represent women pop stars in particularly gendered and ageist ways, I listen to the sonics of fictionalization of two episodes that mythologize Cher’s Auto-Tuning and Swift’s battle to take back her masters from record industry men. First, American Innovations reenacts Cher’s request to producers to create the Auto-Tune effect, but the male host’s ventriloquy of her voice reduces her artistic and technological prowess to parody as they make her seem outdated. Then, in Business Wars, multiple voice actors reenact Swift’s career from its beginning and depict her as a child who doesn’t know any better. These podcasts blur facts and public opinion with alluring dramatizations of what “really happened,” placing listeners in the scene with compelling voice acting and ambient sound effects. In these reenactments, podcasts’ affordances of intimacy and immersion—which hosts often herald as democratizing—perpetuate cultural mythologies about gender and age in popular music.
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Findlay-Walsh, Iain. "Virtual auditory reality." SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 10, no. 1 (2021): 71–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/se.v10i1.124199.
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This article examines popular music listening in light of recent research in auditory perception and spatial experience, record production, and virtual reality, while considering parallel developments in digital pop music production practice. The discussion begins by considering theories of listening and embodiment by Brandon LaBelle, Eric Clarke, Salomè Voegelin and Linda Salter, examining relations between listening subjects and aural environments, conceptualising listening as a process of environmental ‘inhabiting’, and considering auditory experience as the real-time construction of ‘reality’. These ideas are discussed in relation to recent research on popular music production and perception, with a focus on matters of spatial sound design, the virtual ‘staging’ of music performances and performing bodies, digital editing methods and effects, and on shifting relations between musical spatiality, singer-persona, audio technologies, and listener. Writings on music and virtual space by Martin Knakkergaard, Allan Moore, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen & Anne Danielsen, Denis Smalley, Dale Chapman, Kodwo Eshun and Holger Schulze are discussed, before being related to conceptions of VR sound and user experience by Jaron Lanier, Rolf Nordahl & Niels Nilsson, Mel Slater, Tom Garner and Frances Dyson. This critical framework informs three short aural analyses of digital pop tracks released during the last 10 years - Titanium (Guetta & Sia 2010), Ultralight Beam (West 2016) and 2099 (Charli XCX 2019) - presented in the form of autoethnographic ‘listening notes’. Through this discussion on personal popular music listening and virtual spatiality, a theory of pop listening as embodied inhabiting of simulated narrative space, or virtual story-world, with reference to ‘aural-dominant realities’ (Salter), ‘sonic possible worlds’ (Voegelin), and ‘sonic fictions’ (Eshun), is developed. By examining personal music listening in relation to VR user experience, this study proposes listening to pop music in the 21st century as a mode of immersive, embodied ‘storyliving’, or ‘storydoing’ (Allen & Tucker).