
Open Practice: Sonic Orientations
Educator: Jenny Gräf Sheppard, PhD- researcher
Contact person: Jenny Gräf Sheppard, jenny.graf@kunstakademiet.dk
In this course, we move through theoretical concepts around listening and sounding to consider how we come to know ourselves and the world through sound. From what positions and orientations do we listen and how can these positions change through Deep Listening practices of attention? How can we develop embodied sonic sensibilities and create works of art from these? And how does immersive art upend the conventional subject-object relationship within art? The course is experiential and experimental, while at the same time applying theoretical knowledge.
Drawing from a range of practices and fields of inquiry from Phenomenology, Anthropology of the Senses, Media and Sound Studies, Deep Listening, Indigenous Studies and New Feminist Materialisms, the course experiments with listening, sounding subjects through time-based art.
We begin with Deep Listening practices where we engage in composer Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations (recipes for listening) where shifts in attention are used as compositional strategies as well as a means to expand upon notions of the self and subjectivity. We will use collaborative practices to work with the sound’s ability to connect and read from texts that prioritize sonically and expanded sensory sensibilities in its widest range of possible meanings: listening through vibrotactile sensitivity, listening through dreams, or even listening through smell. We will continue to ask: what new forms of storytelling, characters, compositions can emerge out of such a re-orientation?
Several Lab days will involve working in the newly built Ambisonics chamber, a virtual sound space for creating and experiencing spatial sound. The space will be a site for us to experiment collaboratively, creating actual experiments and/or short works that address some of the embodied and vibrotactile possibilities of sound in the space.
Students may bring with them a broad range of interests and research questions that can be dealt with, fleshed out, or sounded via practices of listening and sounding. And each will be involved in reflecting back on what we are reading and doing within their own practice.
PREREQUISITES
Experience with some aspect of sound (technical or non-technical) within your practice or process. This could mean you have worked with a sound editing program, or it could mean you consider sound as an ingredient in your practice, or that you perform with sound.
LEVEL
MA
TIME
8 meetings Feb 7 – April 4
Feb 7,14,28, March 7,14,21,28 , April 4
All lessons 13.00 – 16.00
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the course, students will have engaged in several research methodologies including:
- Embodied practices in art
- Improvisational approaches to composition and art
- Reflective writings about sonic experiences in art
- Immersive sonic-tactile experiments in and outside of the Ambisonics chamber
- Impact of sound outside of the aural apparatus (the ear)
- Spatial sound composition in and outside of the Ambisonics chamber
In addition, students will apply concepts from readings and lectures to discussions, writings and work around the following topics:
- Immersive media/immersive experiences
- Anthropology of the senses
- Sonic sensibilities
- Perspectival re-orientation through sound
- Indigenous perspectives on sound
- Sonic storytelling
ECTS
5
CONTENTS
WEEK 1: Feb 7 SOUNDING
Sonic Orientation: Sounding as Methodology Lecture – 1 hour including discussion
Student Presentations – 1 hour including discussion
Deep Listening – 45 minutes
Written exercise for Reflections
Homework For next week: Read excerpts from:
Thinking the Cosmos, Salome Voegelin, Oliveros writing
WEEK 2: Feb 14 SONIC ORIENTING
Readings discussion – 1.5 hours
Exercise: creating a shared glossary of sonic terms in a google doc
Exercise: Practices of Deep Listening – 1.5 hours
Written exercise for Reflections
Homework for next week: Read excerpts from:
Listening to Country and Energies in the Arts
WEEK 3: Feb 28 LAB DAY 1 SOUNDING SPACE (with Stephen McEvoy)
Reading Discussion
Introduction to the Ambisonic chamber at the RDAFA
Exploring the sound of space, body as instrument for sound, vibro-tactile listening, orienting through the sonic. In-class experimentation with spatial sound
Homework for next week: Read excerpts from Influx & Efflux, by Jane Bennett
create a proposal for a compositional exercise for Lab Day 2
WEEK 4: March 7 LAB DAY 2 SOUNDING BODIES (with Stephen McEvoy)
Reading Discussion
Lab Day 2: In-class creation of 1-2 sonic experiments in Ambisonic Chamber, from proposals created by students.
Writing exercise reflecting on Ambisonic experimental compositions
WEEK 5: March 14 VISITING ARTIST – TBA
Lecture and Q & A
WEEK 6: March 21WRITING WORKSHOP with Sarah Gebran
Sara Gebran’s Quantum Dance/ Quantum Society
WEEK 7: March 28 LAB DAY 3: SOUNDING ENERGIES (with Stephen McEvoy)
Lab Day 3: Speaker and electro-magnetic experiments
WEEK 8: April 4 FINAL REFLECTIONS DAY
Final presentations:
Each student will present work or an investigative process pertaining to their research question
Course Reflections through written and verbal evaluation
TEACHING AND WORKING METHODS
The course will combine seminars, lectures and practical exercises/experimentation. There will be a large emphasis on student participation and contribution.
GROUP FORMATION
12 students
ASSESSMENT
Students must attend 80% of the course in order to receive credit.
READING AND REFERENCES
Below are references for the course. Only some of the readings will be assigned and possibly other readings will be added as we work through the themes in the course. Links are provided to those texts that are online or downloadable for free. Others will be at the library.
Thinking the Cosmos in the 17th Century: Fiction, Hypothesis and Astronomy from Kepler to Huygen, by Francisca Äit-tou-ati, 2010
More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, by Kodwo Eshun, 1999
Sonic Fiction, by Holger Schulze, 2020
Sonic Meditations, by Pauline Oliveros, 1971
A Composers Sound Practice, by Pauline Oliveros, 2005
Sounding the Margins, Collected Writings, by Pauline Oliveros et al., 2010
Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art, by Salome Voegelin, 2010
Listening to Country: Energy, Time and Ecology in Aboriginal Worldmaking, by Andrew Bellety, 2018
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, by Dylan Robinson, 2020
Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, by Douglas Kahn, 2013
Energies in the Arts, by Douglas Kahn et. al, 2019
Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman, by Jane Bennett, 2020
Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent forms of Resistance, by Brandon LaBelle, 2018
Quantum Society, by Sara Gebran (forthcoming by Errant Press)
The Poetics of Relation, Eduoard Glissant, 1990
For more information about Deep Listening and Ambisonics technology please see the two links here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics
https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/
AVAILABLE ONLINE
No, only in case of a new lockdown
TIDSPUNKT
8 meetings Feb 7 – April 4
Feb 7,14,28, March 7,14,21,28 , April 4
All lessons 13.00 – 16.00
STED
Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi
ONLINE
Nej (kun ita. lock down)
NIVEAU
KA-niveau
ECTS
5
SPROG
English
TILMELDING
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