How to Live Together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy

Closing Symposium of Kone-funded research project "How to Live Together in Sound"

We all communicate through sound and contribute in different ways to constituting and sustaining more-than-human communities in the aural domain. We condition and shape our common life-worlds through the performance of our aural and sonic actions: hearing and listening, as well as producing, processing, and distributing sounds. We outline different forms of otherness and commonalities by mobilizing sonic agencies in encounters that unfold, at least partially, in the aural medium.

As artistic research practitioners we provide new evidence of all these complex and intertwined processes by expanding and enhancing our sonic attention and awareness. We thereby disclose new possibilities of understanding different shapes and ways of individual and collective aural being-in-the-world.

Anchored by the generic question “how to live together in sound?” and complemented with the expression of a social, societal, and political orientation “towards sonic democracy,” this symposium offers a framework for in-depth exchanges about practices and method developments, insights and concepts, experiences and expressions that co-constitute our common sonic and aural lives.

With several international guests and over twenty topic presentations and audio works, this symposium assembles a group of artistic researchers and scholars for in-depth conversations around the topics of the research project.

International Guests

• Angela Bartram is an artist and artistic researcher working with objects, sound, video, drawing, print, performance events, curating, and published text. The subject concerns thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and appropriate strategies for documenting the ephemeral. She is also currently engaged in several interdisciplinary research projects concerning empathy: with people; with companion animals, with process and materials, and with the environment.
• Laura Mojica is a philosopher of cognitive science working mainly within enactive and 4E approaches to cognition. Her research has contributed to debates on normativity, agency, and situated cognition. Her current work shows that material environments do not simply support human action, but help constitute the agents that we are. She is also interested in the intersection between artistic practices and the ontology of agents and their environments.
• Jim Nollman is an American composer of music for theatre, a conceptual artist, and an environmental activist. In 1973, he composed a Thanksgiving Day radio piece and recorded himself singing children’s songs with three hundred turkeys. He has recorded interspecies music with various other animals. He released several albums on Folkways Records, including Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas. Nollman directed one of Greenpeace’s first overseas projects, at Iki Island, Japan, where fishermen were slaughtering dolphins to compensate for human overfishing. In 1978, Nollman founded Interspecies, which sponsors artists’ efforts to communicate with animals through music and art. Its best-known project is a twenty-five-year study using live music to interact with wild orcas off the west coast of Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Nollman

Schedule

Monday 12 October

• 10:00 – 10:30  Opening/Arrivals
• 10:30 – 11:00  Welcome
• 11:00 – 12:00  Short Lectures (Session 1)
• 12:00 – 12:30  Audio Works short presentations
• 12:30 – 13:30  Lunch Break
• 13:30 – 15:00 Jan Schacher: «Shared Listening: Social engagement with the environment»
• 15:00 – 15:30  Coffee Break
• 15:30 – 16:10  Short Lectures (Session 2)
• 16:10 – 16:30  Short Break
• 16:30 – 18:00  Long Presentations (Session 3)
• 18:00 – 19:00 Break
• 19:00 – 20:30  Jaana-Erkkilä-Hill and Angela Bartram (outdoor walk)

Tuesday 13 October

• 09:00 – 10:30  Jaana-Erkkilä-Hill and Angela Bartram: «Voicing to the Other»
• 10:30 – 11:00  Coffee Break
• 11:00 – 12:30  Long Presentations (Session 4)
• 12:30 – 13:30  Lunch Break
• 13:30 – 15:00  Petri Kuljuntausta and Jim Nollman «Nichephony»
• 15:00 – 15:30  Coffee Break
• 15:30 – 16:10  Short Lectures (Session 5)
• 16:10 – 16:30  Short Break
• 16:30 – 18:00  Long Presentations (Session 6)
• 18:00 – 19:00 Break
• 19:00 – 22:00 Optional symposium Dinner

Wednesday 14 October

• 09:00 – 12:30 Alex Arteaga and Laura Mojica «Sensitive practices of reflective co-involvement. A practice-based approach to living together (in sound)»
• 12:30 – 13:30  Lunch Break
• 13:30 – 14:30  Short Lectures (Session 7)
• 14:30 – 15:00  Break
• 15:00 – 16:00  Plenary session with Round Table
• 16:00  Symposium Ends

This symposium is conceived and organized by the team of the artistic research project “How to Live Together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy” Alex Arteaga, Jaana Erkkilä-Hill, Jan Schacher, and Petri Kuljuntausta, with the support of the Sibelius Academy production team and Uniarts research services.

The project is funded by the Kone Foundation and hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Further information

Jannika Lahin
jannika.lahin@uniarts.fi

Changes are possible.