Suchergebnisse

This article discusses soundscapes created by young people participating in The Beat of Boyle Street, an in-school recreation-based project that teaches inner-city, at-risk youth to make music using computers and audio production software. Participants are predominantly Aboriginal youth, ages 14 to 20, living in poverty and confronting other challenges, including disabilities, addictions, parenting issues, racism, homelessness, and the vicissitudes of life "on the streets." The soundscape compositions young people create tell stories that speak to the importance of what young people actually do with popular culture in their everyday lives, particularly with hip-hop music and style. Three soundscape examples provided indicate how young people (a) use and negotiate popular culture, (b) politically use and contest city spaces, and (c) act as "border crossers." These points call attention to the power of popular cultural practices as leisure and provide insights for working with young people in recreational contexts.

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite's poetry and the Mighty Sparrow's calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies' advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.

Abstract
'Our Sonic Playground' is the name of a public event organized by the author in 2013 for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. This project attracted the participation of a number of local artists interested in sound, music and the environment. Many were members of the 'World Listening Project' and Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. 'Our Sonic Playground' suggested that this event could serve as a model for actively engaging the public in soundscape awareness, an oftenneglected aspect of life in urban and other environments. This model is potentially useful for future engagements by providing a 'recipe' or set of practical suggestions for educators and 'critical citizens' as it relates to broader concerns with environmental change, urbanism, and awareness of place and public space. The author's pedagogy of play and free improvisation emphasizes the importance of community and a type of aural-tactile engagement with listening and sound making that critically employs the physical, social and aesthetic role of media technology. This interest in public engagement is informed by the foundational work in the early 1970s, by the 'World Soundscape Project', and subsequent activities led by Canadian composers R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax. Partnerships with local arts institutions, community organizations, led by faculty and students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the city's large creative community show how art and technology can reach out of the academy and into daily lives of people by effecting the acoustic identities of cities in positive and socially meaningful ways.

When speaking of democracy, the language of Jacques Rancière becomes strangely physical. "Real democracy", states Rancière in his paper delivered in 1986, "would presuppose that the demos be constituted as a subject present to itself across the whole surface of the social body". In other words, Rancière links life in democracy to the existence of the political subject (in its strong sense) and to its "presence to itself", to its possibility to appear as materially immanent to itself in the reality of the social space. In this paper I explore the urban sonic ecologies of Belgrade in order to answer a question if there is a potential in the everyday embodied existence for establishing vita democratica. Starting off with critical analysis of postmodern philosophy of immanence, I try to resituate subject as an actor in the everyday. Not only is this subject a "rare" rupture in the fabric of language-body (as in Alain Badiou's writings), but it would also be "unstable", intuitive (in Bergsonian sense) and carnal. I then analyse how hegemonic discourses of capitalism-nationalism establish themselves through the means of urban soundscape in Belgrade and discuss two events where I locate these ruptures of subjectivity on the plain of immanence which have the potential not only to destabilize the social machine of captivation, but also to transform the body of the individual into a thinking agent which acts as a political subject.

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such "staged sounds" express the changing identities of cities? This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike.

The purpose of this study was to explore the development, implementation, and impact of a musical learning project in two middle school general music contexts. Specifically, this study sought to consider in what ways, if any, such a project supported critical reflection, created opportunities for border crossing, and encouraged multiple ways of knowing in the music classroom (Giroux, 2005). Co-designed by the researcher and two participating educators, the five-week project focused on the creation of digitally designed student soundscape compositions that aimed to help students draw connections between learning practice and in-the-world experience. Critical listening and dialogue were utilized as pedagogical approaches to help students build upon their diverse knowledges, challenge taken-for-granted norms and draw connections between personal experience, educational endeavors, and the social world. Both the project and study were grounded in the overarching theoretical framework of border crossing (Giroux, 2005) wherein "existing patterns of thought, relationship, and identity are called into question" and "juxtaposed with alternative ways of knowing and being (Hayes & Cuban, 1996, p. 6). This framework was complemented by those of dark and politicized funds of knowledge (Gallo & Link, 2015; Moll et al., 1992; Zipin, 2009), critical listening and mis-listening (Lipari, 2014; Schmidt, 2012b), authorial agency (Matusov et al., 2016), and self-authorship (Baxter Magolda & King, 2004) throughout the analysis. A critical, qualitative approach was utilized in order to consider the problem from the perspectives of the participants and to contextualize it within the realities of individual classrooms (Matsunobu & Bresler, 2014). A hybridized methodological framework of design-based research (McKenney & Reeves, 2012), critical educational action research (Kemmis, 2010), and case study (Yin, 2014) was employed. This framework allowed for the development of a learning project that was iteratively implemented alongside two music educators in order to critically explore and understand classroom practice. Data collection involved interviews with students and educators, focus groups, participant observation, and journaling. This study found that project-based approaches to middle school general music, when predicated on students' experiences and implemented in a way that promotes critical reflection, can help students engage in border crossing practices. Through this project, students in this study interrogated the strengths and limitations of their experiences, juxtaposed their own beliefs with those of others, and began to critically and creatively reimagine their role in and with the world. Cross-case data analysis uncovered themes related to both student and educator experience (Miles et al., 2014). For students, the creation of space for engagement with diverse perspectives, modeling of and practice in critical listening and reflection, and compositional prompts that encourage a critical view of the world emerged as important. For educators, opportunities for dispositional and pedagogical reflection, curricular self-authoring, and discourses based on the complexities of student funds of knowledge arose. Based on these findings, a conceptual model that places practices of border crossing into a creative musical setting was developed. This model, which focuses on the cultivation of critical artistic dispositions wherein students imagine, creatively generate, and artistically actualize ideas that interrogate and engage with local and global realities, was generated to help educators seeking to design critical curricula in the general music setting.

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such »staged sounds« express the changing identities of cities?This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike.With contributions by Jasper Aalbers, Karin Bijsterveld, Carolyn Birdsall, Ross Brown, Andrew Crisell, Andreas Fickers, Annelies Jacobs, Evi Karathanasopoulou, Patricia Pisters, Holger Schulze, Mark M. Smith and Jonathan Sterne.

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments'or soundscapes'characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, GnadenhUtten, and FriedenshUtten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds'musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman'shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future