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Modern Soundscapes
University of New South Wales
July 10-13, 2013
Confirmed Keynote
Speakers: Steven Connor (Cambridge) and Garrett Stewart (Iowa)
What is a modern
soundscape?
This conference aims to address this question by drawing
together researchers engaged with the history and theory of sound and noise
from the fields of literature, film, and media studies, as well as
architecture, music and the visual arts to consider the multiple soundscapes
that have shaped and continue to shape the history of modernity. Jonathan
Sterne contends that dating from around 1725 ‘sound itself’ becomes ‘an object
and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been
conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music’.
This historical claim challenges the assumption that modern culture is
essentially a visual culture, substituting the ear for the eye, and creating a
space for a new sonic history of modernity to be written, theorized and
contested. Thinking through sound has long been a literary
preoccupation. Reflecting on the potential of the “auditory imagination”
T.S.Eliot wrote, it “is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below
the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking
to the primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something
back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly,
or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and
obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most
ancient and civilized entality.” Thinking through the resonant opening
created by poetic form Eliot imagines potential creative fusions that cut
across space, time, culture and forms. Taking inspiration from Eliot’s
expansive vision, we invite papers that engage with sound as a catalyst for
thought, critical and creative practice, and historical reconsiderations of
modern soundscapes from the eighteenth century to the present.
Possible themes/issues may include:
- Voices, Listening, Hearing
- Sound Technologies
- Music and Modern Space
- Literary soundscapes
- Sound & Cultural/National Difference
- Sonic Environments
- Noise/Sound & Everyday Life
- Noise & Silence
- The politics of noise (rioting, dissent, suppression)
- Noise & the Media
- Print Culture/ the History of the Book
- Architectural Space & Acoustics
- Psychology & Noise
- Aesthetics & Noise
- Film Sound
- Noise & the Avant-Garde
- Noise & Modernism
- Victorian & Eighteenth Century Soundscapes
Please submit titles and abstracts for proposed papers by Friday March 1st, 2013 via the
submission form on the conference website.
Conference organisers
Helen Groth, Julian Murphet, Penny Hone, Joseph Cummins
