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There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
Radio / body draws from the philosophical discipline of phenomenology to question a number of prevalent ideas in radio theory and practice. The intention is to shift the basis for comprehending the experience of radio drama from theoretical systems such as semiotics, and abstract metaphors such as ‘visual imagination’ and ‘theatre of the mind’, towards a model that understands it in terms of perceptual, bodily experience of a holistic, graspable world. It posits that radio drama works because the sonic structure created through its dramaturgy expresses the perceptual experience of encountering the auditory world – a ‘listening to a listening’ – and radio dramaturgy can be understood as a process of structuring sounds that listen to the dramatic world. Using this insight, it is posited that conventional radio dramaturgy generates a mode of listening focused on the referential meaning of the sounds, rather than their affective qualities – this is labelled the semantic paradigm of British radio. The history of this paradigm is explored in depth, revealing its emergence to be the product of contingent cultural and technological factors. Now that these factors have changed radically due to the rise of digital technologies, it is argued that a paradigm shift is taking place, with a move towards a more bodily, more resonant dramaturgy.
than ten years later, sound studies is a rapidly growing field to which many scholars from different disciplines, including art, music, cultural studies, history, philosophy, anthropology, architecture, and the natural sciences contribute. However, there remain significant gaps and absences within the formation of sound studies. There is no soundtrack aims to address two of these areas specifically and in juxtaposition: first, its exploration on sound in experimental media art points to a comparative lack of such scholarship in art history, art criticism, and in
turn’ or ‘auditory turn’, as one of its earliest advocates termed it (Ihde, 1976 ), which roughly occurred around the turn of the millennium, and the emergence of the discipline of ‘sound studies’ that followed in its wake. The acoustic turn is often seen as a response to the ‘phonophobia’ that presumably resulted from the criticism of ‘phonocentrism’, as it was formulated by deconstructivism (Stewart, 1990 ; Morris, 1997 : 5–6; Mowitt, 2011 : 23). Sound studies is a multidisciplinary field rooted in the observation that vision has too long been privileged over
This is the first major study in English of cine quinqui, a cycle of popular Spanish films from the late 1970s and early 1980s that starred real-life juvenile delinquents. The book provides a close analysis of key quinqui films by directors such as Eloy de la Iglesia, José Antonio de la Loma and Carlos Saura, as well as the moral panics, public fears and media debates that surrounded their controversial production and reception. In paying particular attention to the soundtrack of the films, the book shows how marginal youth cultures during Spain’s transition to democracy were shaped by sound. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Spanish film, history and cultural studies, as well as to those working in sound studies and youth subcultures more broadly.
Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 245. 7 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen , edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 25–29. 8 Barthes, ‘Listening’, pp. 247–248. 9 Jacques Attali, ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ (1985), in Jonathan Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2012
shout and sing from’ so that ‘anthropology can in some measure counter the long-standing arrogance of colonial and imperial authority, of history written in one language, in one voice, as one narrative’.5 Contemporary sound studies scholars have developed more critical assessments of the field-defining theories of Schafer and Bull, pointing out their sometimes hegemonic understanding of space, politics, and culture while at the same time further developing and pushing their many useful and inspirational ideas. This chapter follows that critical spirit of engagement
cinematic image, and the study of cinema has been, and continues to be, dominated by visual concerns. The challenge taken on by the first wave of modern film sound studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s was to address this cultural bias, and the resultant critical neglect that film sound had suffered. However, the body of literature that has developed since the early 1980s has now established the importance of the study of sound, and it
, something that Michel Chion has termed ‘the audio-visual contract’. For Chion, in the audiovisual contract, ‘the visual and the auditory mutually influence each other … lending each other their respective properties by contamination and projection’ ( 1994 : 9). In its emphasis on the broader sonic experience of delinquency and deviance – one that is both cinematic and extra-cinematic (in particular, through the music the quinquis consumed and the language they used in everyday life) – the book also seeks to create dialogue with sound studies, a discipline whose
, issues, as well as ideas that point to future research projects and agendas in the fields of sound studies, media studies, art history, and art criticism for myself and perhaps also for others. It is, to paraphrase DJ Spooky-That Subliminal Kid, my effort of author as DJ. Sontag begins her essay with this statement: ‘Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.’ 2 Like Sontag’s subject of camp, acoustic time is central to any discussion of sound and media, yet it is also among the hardest things