Listen to the Chinese Buddhist Temples in the Past and Present

Yi Yuan, PhD fellow, University of Eastern-Finland yymonkey427@hotmail.com Chinese Buddhist temples have been considered as the landmarks of quiet and peace in China for thousands of years. In Buddhism, hearing has the significant position in terms of developing into Buddha hood. Nowadays, many of the temples are not only monasteries, but also tourist attractions. The author concerns about two aspects of the sonic environment in Chinese Buddhist temples: What we used to heard in the Buddhist temples, and what we can hear today in the Chinese Buddhist temples. With these two main inquiries, fieldwork contains sonic mapping, sonic memory walking, listening walking and group interview are applied in three Chinese Buddhist temples. This paper presents part of the fieldwork carried out in the Chinese Buddhist temples mainly about listening walking and sonic memory walking. The listening walking and sonic memory walking are applied to volunteers from monks/nuns, staffs, visitors and residents nearby. The listening walking and sonic memory walking are two methods in motion stimulate new experiential ideas about dealing with the acoustic environment in Chinese Buddhist temples. These two methods assist the researcher to inspire the interviewee to supply abundant and vivid sonic experience of Chinese Buddhist temples both in the past and present. How testees react to these methods and in which way these methods could be accepted by the testees in Chinese Buddhist temples are going to be presented in this paper.

Re-creating the past Research topic: Radio voices – schooled, performed and analyzed Anna Lawaetz, PhD fellow, University of Copenhagen alawaetz@hum.ku.dk The ideas of how people spoke in e.g. 1930ies is build on recordings. Recordings – either they are done for ethnological purposes or for radio transmissions, are based on technology. They are mediations. Mediations that, according to my test results, radically affect how we understand the past. This paper will present my first results on reshaping technological setups of audio files from the Danish Radio Broadcast. By using the CEDAR Audio hardware and the software plug-in tool Reshape it has been possible to create filters, that makes it possible to compare weather forecast recordings from 30’ies and up to present time by applying these different filters to one neutrally recorded sound file. To listen to the same voice but with the technical filter from different eras gives an idea about the importance of technology for the perception of the radio voice. But also surprisingly point out how we thought people in the 30ies spoke. That tempo changes has occurred and affected the pitch level is well known, but that the idea of Danes speaking “stiff” and a bit staccato at that time also occurs from the technological mediation, becomes clear in this presentation. Since the Danish Broadcast and the magazine The Radio listener (Radiolytteren) became a reality in 1925 the advertisement keyword in commercials for radio receivers, headphones and loudspeakers has been to create not only a “good” sound but a “natural sound”. That means to overcome the technological based mediation. This idea of recordings of sound being 1:1 transmissions of the reality seems to be very profound in our perception of sound documents. By pointing on the mediated aspect the role of technology’s influence on our perception of the past is thematized.

A museological approach: Radio as immaterial heritage Christian Hviid Mortensen, PhD-fellow at University of Southern Denmark chmo@litcul.sdu.dk Radio is a major part of our media heritage, but it is seldom featured in exhibitions or part of museum collections. Museums traditionally operate with a material concept of artefacts, but with the advent of electronic and digital media the need for a broader concept to accommodate intangible or immaterial forms of heritage, such as radio, has become more apparent. This presentation outlines the challenges in conceptualizing radio in a museological context as artefacts to be exhibited. These challenges range from the purely theoretical of delineating immaterial artefacts to more practical and methodological concerns about implementing these kinds of artefacts in exhibitions. Radio sound as museum artefacts calls for a better understanding of how the audience perceives and experience sound and how to use these insights in the design of an exhibition. Radio as heritage calls for didactic strategies in bridging the knowledge gap there exists between the modern audience and an appreciative understanding of historic radio material. This presentation proposes possible responses to both challenges based on insights from learning and design theory.

Articulating private and common sonic space in urban Finland and Turkey Meri Kytö, PhD fellow at University of Eastern Finland meri.kyto@uef.fi In this paper I will present the key arguments of my PhD research looking into the four case studies that comprise it. The subjects of the case studies are 1) apartment home acoustemology in Finland, 2) articulations of acoustic order and neighborhood relations in a housing cooperative in Istanbul, 3) sonic representations of private Istanbul in New Turkish cinema and 4) construction of an (electro-)acoustic community of the football supporter group Çarşı. I will argue for the importance of private soundscapes as important discursive texts to be acknowledged when talking about the acoustic environment. When talking about acoustic environments the focus often turns to ”our soundscape”, that is more generally speaking the shared public, common and the outdoors. If considering the spaces in which everyday life is spent we realize that expectations, cultural codes, agency and preferences concerning the soundscape change significantly when it comes to acoustic privacy and private space. These notions construct modes of sound practices that vary from one sonic culture to another and at the same time pose challenges to ethnographic soundscape field work.

Noise and silence in 20th century arts and aesthetics – an intermedial perspective. Thomas Bjørnsten Kristensen, PhD fellow, University of Aarhus aesttbk@hum.au.dk The presentation will discuss the aesthetics of noise and silence as manifested in a selection of recent works mixing sonic and visual components. It is demonstrated how the significatory and expressive effects of such works are established through the combination of specific medialities and their mutual exchange; something that can be analyzed from both a historical and aesthetic-theoretical point of view. Thus, the presentation aims to question how we should approach contemporary installation- and media art practices in which sound and image play an equally important role, but do so differently than in the case of film, video and similar formats. The point of departure for this discussion will be an analysis of the solo exhibition ”db” by the Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda, showed earlier this year at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. (www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/exhibition.php?id=32934&lang=en)

Losing coherence, gaining meaning? Åsa Stjerna, PhD fellow, University of Gothenburg asa.stjerna@telia.com The starting point for the proposed presentation is a discussion on the topic translatability from science to art, and artistic practices where scientific data impossible to perceive is transformed to an embodied spatial, audible experience. If sonification per se could be defined as transforming data to sound, artistic sonification to a great extent concerns issues related to the contextualization of meaning, making information relevant in a context far beyond the scientific context. Strategies emphasizing an immersed listening/bodily experience make the mapping process complex when data is mapped to not merely sonic signals but ephemeral qualities as intensities, atmospheres and ambiences. – What is the relation between coherence and relevance in the translating situation from science into artistic embodied practices? – What does transmission of knowledge from one discourse (science) into another (art) mean? – What is lost, and what is gained in the process of translation?

By discussing an artistic project, exhibited as a large scale public site-specific sound

installation, Currents (2011), based on a scientific project in the ocean surrounding the Faroe Islands, connected to the Department of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm whose research examines the inflow of warm waters in the North Sea and its links to the melting of ice on the northern hemisphere, the aim is to discuss the complexity of translatability. The presentation emphasizes the importance of an expanded notion of the process of mapping, in terms of a complex process where one context with its specific set of conditions is made meaningful through a different context based on different kind of conditions. Information, Currents http://users.notam02.no/~joranru/currents.html Information, PhD Project http://www.hsm.gu.se/english/doctoral_programmes/Musical_Performance_and_Interpretation/asa-stjerna/

MUSIC AND NON-MUSIC: TOWARD ECOLOGICAL COMPOSITION Pessi Parviainen, PhD fellow, Theatre Academy Helsinki pessi.parviainen@teak.fi Music has a problematic relationship with sound design and sound art. Even after the avantgarde stretched the definitions of music, the problem persists: there seems to be a conceptual border between music and sound design / sound art. In the performing arts and other situations where music coexists with other concepts of structuring sound, or with the ‘unstructured’ sounds of the sonic environment, this border is a hinderance. Why some sounds that a musician or actor makes are music, while other sounds are not? Why can’t all sounds of a performance be composed within the same framework? My dissertation research tries to come up with a proposal for such a framework. Could we speak of composing sounds without defining them first (as music or non-music)? In this presentation, I present the concept of ecological composition. I intend it to be a conceptual tool for both analysis and production, in the context of artistic uses of sound. With it, I hope to avoid the unnecessary division between music and non-music.

Sound as performance Sanne Krogh Groth, Ph.D, assistant professor, Roskilde University, sanneg@ruc.dk During the last 15 years sound art has been an issue of discussion. Definitions of the term have raised interesting debates with positions ranging from ”Klangkunst ist zum Hören und zum Sehen” (Motte-Haber 1999), Labelle’s focus on “the activation of the existing relation between sound and space” (2006), Weibel stressing the genre’s relation to media, to Licht defining sound art within a context of visual art (2010). The battles on definitions are of cause not only battles on words, but have had a direct influence on how histories were written, works were analysed, and exhibitions and performances were selected and designed. In addition to these discussions I will suggest, that sound art can be identified through a certain mode of perception, as much as, or even more, than it can be categorised through history and external studied objects. Sound art is not only a question of visual and spatial relations to sound, but is also inviting the audience to participate in the same sense as performance and performance art does. Sound art can therefore be found in a continuum between the perception applied to music and the perception applied to performance. - A perception that pendulums between sound as an abstract phenomenon, and sound as a performative and contextual phenomenon, making one aware of such characteristics as the present, subversion, the relational and presentation. The presentation includes examples of sound art that are respectively acousmatic, staged as conventional concerts, and installed in public and institutional spaces.