SEM Sounding Board Virtual Exhibition 2023
Virtual exhibition, 14.-17.09.2023
Deadline: 07.07.2023
The SEM Sounding Board, an annual curated collection of field recordings and sound pieces organized by the SEM Sound Studies Section warmly invites contributions for this year’s annual meeting. This year’s theme is “Sound, Time, and Memory.” Taking this triad as the main axes for this year's edition, how sound art and installations serve as a means to work on the frontiers between past and present? How can we conceptualize artistic expressions focused on sound as a form of artistic expression, as a living archive of sound and memory?
Sounding and listening are methods of knowing and being in the world (Feld 1996). Ethnographic work remains to be done that redresses the traditional division of the sensorium. For one, the study of sound as an object “has been neglected ... [it] offers a fundamentally different knowledge of the world than vision” (Smith 2002, 309). Sound offers new materials to study and theoretical models to interpret them. In practice, fieldwork methods of sonic intervention channel new ways of listening and knowing.
Within the scholarly ferment of sound studies, memory is a central matter. Karin Bijsterveld (2009) writes of “sound souvenirs;” Anna Harris (2015) of “sound memories,” Jonathan Sterne (2003) of the “audible past.” Sound evokes, conveys, and renders public (and thus often also contentious) our memories of past events and engagements. The field is dense with research organized around sound’s relationship to time and memory, a concern made ever more complex by asynchronous communications and time-shaking events.
Though musicological studies have long exhibited a preoccupation with the themes of musical time, meter, and rhythm, recent studies have explored a more capacious set of time scales. Some have explored how temporalities of everyday life irrupt in musical contexts; others explore the dense interrelationship between music and historical memory, elucidating the important role that festivals and celebrations, religious experience; traumatic events; and temporal values pattern musical experience; and, a variety of composers, musicians, and theorists have taken up Henri Bergson’s (2001) rejoinder to explore the subjective experience of time as qualitative, demonstrating the wax and wane of time-scales as they become lodged in the body.
Sounding Board warmly welcomes submissions from undergraduate students, graduate students, scholars, and practitioners who are invested in sound art, field recording, and acoustemological processes more broadly. This year’s version of Sounding Board will launch in September from 14th to 17th as a virtual exhibition, in order to host and display art from all over the world, reaching far beyond the usual boundaries of a conference event. Contributions don’t have to be virtuosic technological feats, just critically engaging. The new deadline for proposals is July 7th. At that time, we ask for a 100-250 word abstract that describes the intended project. Please submit the abstract to Jacob (jsunshine@g.harvard.edu), Rita (ritainaciosantos1998@gmail.com), or Winnie (winniewc@sas.upenn.edu). The curation committee will notify all participants whether their project has been accepted by July 15th. Final submissions of audiovisual material will be due: August 15th.