Sound Studies Lab

Tomorrow, Tuesday 23/09, we will begin the fall semester of our Online Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies with a presentation by Thiago Leiros-Costa:

Topic:

Studies of Air and Smoke: A Framework

Presenter:

Thiago Leiros-Costa (Milano/Verona, IT)

Time:

3.15 - 4.30pm CET

More details on the presentation - including the zoom link:

https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/.../studies-of-air.../

As always, you can find announcements for all our colloquium's conversations & presentations right here:

https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/.../sound.../calendar/

See you tomorrow, 3.15pm CET!

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CALL FOR PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS:

Why does everyone listen to ambient music?

It dawned on me early last year that a number of very different people, from very different backgrounds and of very different ages and social classes, are surprisingly united these days by their love of listening to at least one genre of ambient music. Whether at work or during yoga, while commuting or relaxing at the weekend or in the evening, as a temporary calming agent to horrific ecocide and societies slipping mindlessly into fascism, or simply as a wholesome listening experience: ambient music seems to be one of the hidden champions these days.

I asked myself: Why does this genre have a kind of ubiquitous majority appeal in the 2020s? How do all the ways of producing, distributing and consuming ambient music relate to each other? Are new practices of production, distribution and consumption emerging? Which of these practices are particularly relevant across the planet, especially in the global south?

Together with Ulrik Schmidt, who has written a fascinating “Philosophy of Ambient Sound” (2023), we invite all practitioners and researchers, composers and scholars, producers and thinkers to join us in this endeavour to understand better how the genre of ambient music actually functions in this century?

With a deadline of June 1st, 2025, 12pm CEST we ask you to propose a presentation that could address, for example, one of the following areas

- local ambient music scenes all around the planet
- ambient music and digital streaming platforms
- distribution of ambient music
- technologies for ambient music
- mood regulation and affective control
- subgenres and hybrids (e.g. Dark Ambient, Lowercase Ambient, Witch House, Isolationist Ambient, Goblincore...)
- ambient uses of music in architecture, art, design and film
- ambient music in social media and audiovisual media

You can propose either a research paper, an audio paper or an ambient music presentation.

From the 15th to the 17th of September 2026, the conference will be hosted by our partner, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.

Please see our full Call for Paper for details of presentation formats, deadlines and contact details:

Call for papers: The Ambient Music Conference Conference.

In the second colloquium of this Spring we have the pleasure to hear about and to discuss with Jacek Smolicki his approach to:

Voices as Relations

Presenter: Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, SWE)

Abstract:

The emergence of new voice technologies, machine listening techniques, and voice cloning services raises several ethical and political concerns across private and public realms. As voice has historically and cross-culturally been perceived as an expression of the self, deeply situated at the core of being a human being, serious existential challenges arise in this respect too. Where should we search for and locate the self, the beholder of voice, in techno-cultures increasingly populated by computationally generated, disembodied voices?

Rather than seeking the essence of voice as a phenomenon that can be attributed to a single subject, this presentation embarks on a journey to understand voice as inherently a relational event. I suggest that current developments at the intersection of voice and AI do not necessarily jeopardize voice–or at least, they do not only do so–but also remind us that voices are shaped by and embedded within larger, thicker, and temporally extended ecologies.

Therefore, instead of succumbing to the acousmatic aura and eeriness evoked by seemingly disembodied artificial voices, I propose viewing them as components of a larger "acousmatrix": a dense field of relations spanning various subjects, materialities, and histories. Critically inclined artistic practices, as I will argue, can help uncover this intricate mesh of relations while simultaneously pointing toward alternative, more just, and perhaps more hopeful configurations of these dynamics.

Please share:

Voices as Relations Presenter: Jacek Smolicki (Uppsala University, SWE).

As every semester, the Sound Studies Lab offers a series of online presentations and workshop-style discussions under the title "Colloquium Sound and Sensory Studies" - open to all interested inm, thinking with, or working in sound and sensory studies. We meet every second week, on Tuesdays, from 15.15 to 16.30, this semester starting on February 11.

This colloquium was actually held for the first time in 2007 (sic!) at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2020 - you can guess why ;) - we moved the colloquium completely online, to Zoom. We have stayed on Zoom ever since because: this format allows us to welcome around 10-20 scholars, usually from at least three continents.

Some of the topics our scholars will be discussing and presenting this semester include

- European Dance Music Cultures and Sound (May 20)

- A Participatory podcast from the Alpine village of Cevo, Italy (April 9)

- Listening Habits and Non-Linear Temporalities (March 11)

- Sound Studies and Sonic Methodologies in Russia since the 2010s (March 25)

- Poetic Voice in Contemporary (Polish) Poetry from the Perspective of Sound Studies (February 11)

All the dates and abstracts for all the presentations this semester you can find right here, as always:

Calendar 11 Feb. 2025, 15:15-16:30 The Voice "in Action" Presentation by Katarzyna Ciemiera (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, PL).

From June 16-24, 2025, we are offering a course on "Sound Cities and Sonic Sensibilities" in Trondheim, Norway.

You can apply to participate until February 10, 2025 - and we have an info meeting coming up:

THIS Friday, November 22, at 14:00 CET we will be happy to answer all your questions (and on January 15, 2025 we offer another info meeting).

You can find all the information about this course at the link below:

ERASMUS Course: Sonic Sensibilities – Sound Cities Together with three international scholars and three international universities, we are offering in June 2025 an intensive course, funded by the ERASMUS Mobility program: Participants can learn and practice in two courses …Continue reading

In June 16-24, 2025 we offer an intensive course, funded by the ERASMUS Mobility program, on SONIC SENSIBILITIES / SOUND CITIES.

Participants can learn and practice in two courses in Trondheim, Norway, to deepen understanding of how ecologies of the natural and built environment are shaped by sound and the ways in which sonic sensibilities are articulated.

While the first course, Sonic Sensibilities, explores sonic knowledge in classrooms and everyday experiences, the Sound Cities course examines urban ecologies and related possibilities for sustainability.

We are:

Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University, USA

Sunniva Hovde, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)

Roger Norum, University of Oulu, Finland

Holger Schulze, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

You find all the details about the course and how to apply (15 students max.!) at this link:

ERASMUS Course: Sonic Sensibilities – Sound Cities Together with three international scholars and three international universities, we are offering in June 2025 an intensive course, funded by the ERASMUS Mobility program: Participants can learn and practice in two courses …Continue reading

Tomorrow, on Tuesday 22/10, 15.15CEST, Lucy Cathcart Frödén (Postdoc, University of Oslo, NOR) - who recently started her time as a.g guest researcher with the Sound Studies Lab at KU - joins us on Zoom to speak about her research on aspects of carceral listening.

Through short vignettes from collaborative research encounters in Scotland (through the Distant Voices project), Norway and Ireland (through the Prisons of Note project), her presentation will explore some of the paradoxes and tensions in prison-based music projects, and ask:

how might we understand attentive listening as an ethical intervention in this context?

Join us (zoomlink can be found directly on the webpage!)

https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/sound-studies-lab/calendar/2024/carceral-listening/

Next week, on Tuesday 8/10, 15.15CEST, Paulus von Horne joins us on Zoom to speak about their research on an alternative trajectory in voice technology by resurrecting and cloning the distinctly artificial voices of 70s and 80s home computers.

Is it possible to embrace these "unnatural" voices and thereby to transcend the tech industry's relentless pursuit of "natural" synthetic speech, which encodes binary gender norms?

Join us (zoomlink can be found directly on the webpage!)

Embracing Unnaturalness Presenter: Paulus van Horne (PhD, University of Boulder, Colorado, USA).

Please join us on Mastodon - more and more sound studies scholars and sound artists can be found there:

Sound Studies (@[email protected]) Attached: 1 image Join us today - at our Zoom-only "Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies": Tuesday, September 24, at 15:15 CEST Our presenter today is: Walter S. Gershon (Rowan University, USA): "Multipolyphonies, Vibrational Affects, and Deep Listening. Conceptualizing Ecologies, Relations, and Knowl...

After our hybrid conference HOW TO STUDY SOUND? last week, we would like to invite all of you who are interested to join our online-only "Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies" on Zoom that we have every two weeks. It is our collective "thinking workshop".

This coming Tuesday, September 24, at 15:15 CEST, we welcome Walter S. Gershon (Rowan University, USA), who will present his work under this title:

"Multipolyphonies, Vibrational Affects, and Deep Listening.

Conceptualizing Ecologies, Relations, and Knowledge inwiththrough the Sonic."
https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/sound-studies-lab/calendar/2024/multipolyphonies-vibrational-affects-and-deep-listening/

The colloquium is strictly limited to 75 minutes.

If you cannot attend this time, please see if one of our future sessions this semester might be more convenient for you:

https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/sound-studies-lab/calendar/

Please feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested!

Our conference is at an end. We took off from the cacophony of the Somme trenches in the audible past, touched down to gauge the situation of seismic contemporary publishing strategies, only to bounce off once more into a riot of possible sonic futures!

Its been a thrill!

To all presenters, contributors, participants, technicians, coffee brewers, traveling agencies, student assistents, organizers and catering team:

!! THANK YOU !!

So! As we prepare to engage in the last plenary discussion on this wonderful 2nd day of our conference 'HOW TO STUDY SOUND?', we again would like to thank everybody involved in making this happen.

Today has been filled with truly inspiring talks and valuable discussions here in Copenhagen and online across the interwebbed globe

Join again tomorrow for our final day, where we together shall stare into the unkown space of future possibilities & engagements in our beloved field sound studies.

All the best,

Sound Studies Lab