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[ecrea] Music, Sound, and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private Space
Wed Feb 13 16:00:41 GMT 2008
MUSIC, SOUND, AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF PUBLIC AND
PRIVATE SPACE -
A conference at Cambridge University, UK, April 18th-19th 2008
We would like to draw your attention to this
international conference, to be held in Cambridge
University at CRASSH (the Centre for Research in
the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities). It
will interest graduate students and faculty, and
is now open for registration. Please note that
numbers are limited due to space restrictions.
For further information and to register:
<http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/musicsoundspace.html>http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/musicsoundspace.html
The conference is organised by Georgina Born and
Tom Rice and has an exciting line-up of speakers
including Philip Bohlman (Chicago), Michael Bull
(Sussex), Eric Clarke (Oxford), Steven Connor
(Birkbeck), Nick Cook (Royal Holloway), Suzanne
Cusick (NYU), Ruth Davis (Cambridge), Tia DeNora
(Exeter), Richard Middleton (Newcastle), Jonathan
Sterne (McGill), Martin Stokes (Oxford) and David
Toop (London). James Lastra (Chicago) will give a keynote speech.
The conference is accompanied by a concert of
sound art at Kettles Yard in Cambridge on the
evening of Friday 18th April, with works by
Cedric Maridet (Hong Kong), Brandon Labelle
(Copenhagen), John Wynne (London) and John Levack Drever (London).
CONFERENCE THEMES -
The conference pursues themes raised by the
recent burgeoning of auditory culture studies,
which has evolved at the interface of the
anthropology of sound and senses, ethnomusicology
and musicology, critical theory and sociology of
music, social psychology and philosophy of music,
cultural studies, and the new practices of sound art and site-specific music.
The conference addresses, first, the ways in
which sound and music, particularly as they are
technologically mediated, have come to play a
pivotal role in re-drawing the boundaries between
the public and the private by individuals,
groups and institutions. There is growing
awareness that acoustic strategies may be used by
groups and individuals in demarcating space and
in projecting themselves within it, establishing
new and often contested boundaries between the
public and the private. This tendency is striking
in relation to physical and virtual spaces, on
the one hand, and to social spaces, on the other;
music and sound are increasingly used to mark
territory, place, and social identities. Music is
employed both to humanise space and attract
sociality, and to discourage human contact and
block off sociality. Although some of these
developments were apparent with analogue audio
technologies, they have been exacerbated by
digitisation and by musics privileged relations
with the internet, in which it leads other
expressive forms in the degree and scale of its
remediation. The conference will therefore
examine the manner in which musical and
acoustical dynamics have become integral to the
construction and imagination of social and
physical space, and the ways in which they may be
both constructed and negotiated.
Relatedly, the conference explores how the
proliferation of sound technologies has resulted
in a situation in which acoustic environments are
increasingly malleable. To an unprecedented
degree, music and sound are being employed to
create a nesting of the private and public,
while audio technologies are used to effect a
series of radical transformations of musical
experience: children using sound technologies to
create individual private environments within
the collective, private domestic space of the
home; soldiers using individual sound
technologies inside tanks in battle to construct
a sense of intimate, affective space and identity
which fends off and occludes the public,
ambient sounds of violent warfare; the mobile
phone used to create a new genre of
private-in-public communication; and real-time,
embodied intersubjective musical practices being
replaced by virtual, disembodied music-making and
virtually-distributed musical cognition.
Understanding these developments requires that we
make use of the conceptual tools of musicology,
the social sciences and critical theory, while
also necessitating that they be re-worked for the
more complex, pervasive and ramifying mediations
of contemporary life. The conference therefore
brings together leading theorists of music,
sound, mediation and modernity, as well as those
engaged in rich empirical research historical,
contemporary and cross-cultural to debate these
developments and outline new perspectives.
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