Conference Announcement: Listening In, Feeding Back

Listening In, Feeding Back




Organizers:


David Novak, Columbia University, Society of Fellows in the Humanities
den12@columbia.edu
Ana Maria Ochoa, Columbia University, Department of Music
ao2110@columbia.edu

Conference and concert are free and open to the public. No registration or tickets necessary. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Description:
In recent years, several North American academic disciplines, including history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and media studies, have devoted significant attention towards practices of listening. The act of listening is undoubtedly an underexplored dimension of modern sensory experience -- and of modernity itself, which is too often characterized by an overdetermined regime of visuality. What can listening offer to emerging interdisciplinary work on perception, performance, aesthetics, social life, and the circulation of sound media? Listening is more than a given function of musical interpretation, which might attend to sound only in its deliberately aesthetic or openly communicative forms. Rather, it is a culturally-situated practice that shapes the particular spatial and material conditions of our perception. Listening influences the social distinctions of daily life, and is inextricably bound to aesthetic and bodily experiences with music and noise. And increasingly, characterizations of listening recognize its diverse practices as productive transcultural relationships, which in themselves constitute the globalization of media. Our experiences with sound are key to broad projects of self-making that rewrite logics of authorship and cultural origin through circulation and new modes of appropriation.

Adding the metaphor of feedback to contemporary inquires into listening encourages us to reconsider the creative social relations that develop within the distinct spaces and circulations of sound media. Feedback touches on the cyclical nature of people’s experiences with recordings, the recurrent relationships between different sites of listenership, the connections between production and consumption, and the many circuits of authenticity and transformation through which sound travels. Re-situating feedback from cybernetics and network theory into mediated social practices of listening helps to reveal logics of interconnection, emplacement, attention and subjectivity that have become crucial to cultural politics. Feedback loops challenge linear histories of music; the isolation of hearing as a sense (and of listening publics from each other); and the maintenance of distinctions between genres and categories of musical style and experience. Feedback instead offers links, circulations, and connections: not as closed tautological arguments, but cross-wired circuitries that recognize constant change, and also stress their own coincidental and unpredictable infrastructure.

Themes to be addressed may include:
1. The role of listening and feedback in the experience of media circulation

2. Listening as a conscious re-orientation of ongoing productions of knowledge (both in everyday social practice and in terms of received disciplinary problems)

3. Listening in the context of electronic media and technology, and the changing environments of musical production and reproduction

4. Feedback and listening as creative practices in popular music genres

5. Feedback as a revision of linear narratives of historical invention in terms of coincidence and simultaneity

6. Feedback in the transactions of new media networks, which challenge existing terms of communication, democratic exchange, and political control of sound

7. Listening in alternative modernities: aesthetics conceived through relationships of transcultural difference, colonialities, and histories of mimesis, imitation and influence

List of Presenters:
Karin Bijsterveld (Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University)

Steven Connor (Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College)

James Fei (Music/Intermedia Arts, Mills College)

Steven Feld (Anthropology/Music, University of New Mexico)

Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology, UC Berkeley)

Brian Kane (Music Theory, Yale University)

Louise Meintjes (Music/Anthropology/Ethnomusicology, Duke University)

David Novak (Society of Fellows, Columbia University)

Otomo Yoshihide (Independent Composer/Performer)

Mark Smith (History, University of South Carolina)

Jonathan Sterne (Communication Studies, McGill University)

Elizabeth Travassos (Folklore/Ethnomusicology, University of Rio de Janeiro)

Amanda Weidman (Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College)

Papers will be 30 minutes in length, each to be followed by 15 minute period for Q&A.

Concert:
There will be a concert performance on Friday, Feb. 13 at 8 PM at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University featuring Alvin Lucier, Otomo Yoshihide, and the trio of James Fei, Kato Hideki, and Nakamura Toshimaru.