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Aesthetics, Experience, and Interpretation of the Sonic Arts

This is just an outline to structure our contributions. Feel free to delete the subtitles of your sections once you add your work in.

Introduction:

The sonic arts, thought of in terms of the interconnected, “trans-aesthetic trends in scholarship” such as ethnomusicology, popular music studies, contemporary media theory, art history, acoustic ecology, etc., propose sound as a problem meant to be experienced, analyzed, questioned, and critiqued across the entire spectrum of culture.

Reading the Sonoric Landscape:

The differences in cultures manifests itself not only in social culture, but in visual art and sonoric art just as strongly. Because of this, musicologists can interpret and recreate unrecorded soundscapes through the works of art produced by a specific culture. Visual art and music are closely linked through the confrontation of power, only sound acts in both space and time.

Music Research and Psychoacoustic:

Noises of the Avant-Garde:

The avant-garde movement in sound explored concepts of communication through noise and sounds, not communication of concepts through words. Closely mirroring the Dada movement, the rejection of linear logic resulted in impulsive, accurate communication that surpassed the creative limits of words.

Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality:

The “giant inertia engine” that is music journalism is and has always been inadequate because speaking for the music defeats the purpose of listening to it. By disregarding and transcending the notion that concepts such as “blackness” or “Black Music” have inherent qualities and by realizing that each cultural value system is but one of infinitely many potential operating systems through which one can see the world one comes to the conclusion that in order to understand the present one need not to look to the past, but rather to seek guidance from the future.

Starship Africa:

Auditory Relations:

By combining and taking a “McLuhanesque” approach to analyzing the histories of sound art and it’s site-specific, visual counterpart, which span from the early 1950’s to today, sound can be interpreted as being inherently relational because sound always exists in a multiplicity of locations at once, it always occurs, directly and indirectly, in the presence of others, and it’s never a privately experienced phenomena. Sound and space in terms of their materiality, social presence, and psychological implications are intrinsically linked to one another in that sound itself necessarily exists with and through space beyond itself. Sound art engages the listener on multiple levels through an understanding of the consonance and discord between sound and space, self and other.

Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music:

Conclusion: Sound exists as a method of communication, a method of translation of environmental imput and cultural contexts. The sonic arts recognizes the need for understanding and interpreting noise through every available sense, not only scholarly analysis, because sound and its meaning exists as a universal experience not just a scholarly endeavor.