[ecrea] Music, Sound, and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private Space

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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