Listening to the Confluence Project: Part 2 – by Lutz Koepnick

In my last blog, I wrote about a recent visit to Maya Lin’s Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park in Eastern Washington. Associated with the Confluence Project, the site asked challenging questions about how sound and listening to silence can help us recognize the devastating impact of Lewis and Clark’s 1804/5 expedition on Native American … Read more

Listening to the Confluence Project: Part 1 – by Lutz Koepnick

Maya Lin's Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park

In this and my next post to this blog, I write about a recent trip along the Columbia River and invite you to think about sound’s ability to read violent history against the grain and memorialize the silence that followed the destruction of vibrant sites of life. How, I ask, can we listen to the … Read more

Q&A with Jing-Adel Wang

Half Sound, Half Philosophy

In this regular Q&A series, we interview authors and major figures in the field about their work, interests, and overall thoughts on sound studies. Based in Hangzhou, China, Jing-Adel Wang is a sound studies scholar, art anthropologist, curator and practitioner in sound art. She is currently an Associate Professor of sound studies at Zhejiang University, … Read more

An Excerpt from Listening After Nature by Mark Peter Wright

Listening-with Humans and Nonhumans Auditioning a field recording, and assembling its meaning, is a similar yet very different process to making a jigsaw. As a child, I tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the crutch of the image guide. It was a process that oscillated between hope and despair. Hope at the freedom to … Read more

The War is Over but the Sound Remains: WWI and the Life of a Shell – by Michael Bull

Carpathian Mountains

When do the sounds and silences of any war really end? I recently came across a contemporary story of a World War One shell exploding in the Carpathian Mountains. A newly married British couple of Ukrainian heritage, Norbert and Lydia Makarchuk had camped out in the idyllic countryside to share a honeymoon evening with family … Read more

Pythagoras’s Veil 2.0 – by Lutz Koepnick

Thousands of college instructors, after doing their job for the last year primarily from home and via video, are back to teach in real classrooms and lecture halls this fall. Instead of seeing their students locked into separate Zoom tiles on screen, they finally face them head-on again, physically present. Little about this, however, feels … Read more

Q&A with Alan Licht

sound art revisited

In this regular Q&A series, we interview authors and major figures in the field about their work, interests, and overall thoughts on sound studies. This week, we spoke to musician, music editor and writer, Alan Licht. What are you working on right now? Common Tones: Selected Interviews 1995-2020, a collection of my interviews with various … Read more

The ear of the remnant: New modes of listening in the Second World War – by Ian Biddle

This blog post examines the thesis, often stated in sound studies (Goodman, Hartford, Porcello, Daughtry), that war transforms the ways in which humans engage with sound. Much of this recent work has focussed on the idea that, as Hartford puts it, war ‘challenged prior understandings of the relationship between “listening”, “noise”, and “music”.’[1] There is … Read more

Listening for baselines beyond anthropophony: An interview with Bernie Krause

by D. Ferrett World-renowned soundscape ecologist and sound designer Bernie Krause discusses his field recording methods and ecological perspectives as developed over decades of recording wild soundscapes in this interview with D Ferrett. D: During your career you have worked as a musician, a recording engineer and producer and, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, … Read more

Q&A with Brandon LaBelle

In this regular Q&A series, we interview authors and major figures in the field about their work, interests, and overall thoughts on sound studies. This week, we spoke to Brandon LaBelle, an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. Brandon develops and presents artistic projects within a range of … Read more