Global Sonic Culture
The Representation of Indigenous Culture: Disney Animation, Working Class Country Music and First Nation Sounds
Brother Bear is a 2003 American animated musical fantasy comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is the 44th Disney animated feature film. In the film, an Alaska native boy named Kenai pursues a bear and kills it, but the Spirits, incensed by this unnecessary death, change Kenai into a bear himself as punishment.[3] In order to be human again, Kenai must travel to a mountain where the Northern lights touch the earth.
According to Janice Esther Talk, Brother bear, has a rather ambiguous setting that is neither explicitly identified in the film nor immediately obvious to viewers. Indeed, the setting varies throughout the film with rather incongruous imagery, such as the juxtaposition of glaciers with g geyser fields. The time period is best defined as ‘long ago’ and is not indicated until woolly mammoths are depicted roaming through the wilderness. Finally, it is not particularly obvious which indigenous group is being presented in the film. The audience, then, is left to pull together fragments of information to complete the picture and make sense of the visual and sonic elements presented.
DIRTY EARS: HEARING AND HEARINGS
IN THE CANADIAN LIBERAL SETTLER COLONY Lee Veeraraghavan
Dr. Carol Muller
Despite vocal opposition from the indigenous people, public hearing processes in Canada play an important part in determining whether or not oil and gas pipeline development projects will be approved. Attention to hearing as an aesthetic and political practice has been theorized by the Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer as a fundamental part of culture and nation building. This dissertation explores the ways the Canadian government and settler society use hearing as a silencing technique, mobilizing the field of aurality to place limits on the expression of indigenous dissent. The research is based on two years of ethnographic work among activists fighting oil and gas development in Vancouver, and indigenous sovereigntists resisting pipelines in the province of British Columbia’s north. Juxtaposing case studies from different struggles over land use in British Columbia with a deconstruction of R. Murray Schafer’s writings and select compositions, this dissertation shows how the field of aurality shapes land and people.
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things takes up Schwartz’s first challenge by reconceptualizing the substance of material politics as vibrant. Bennett builds on the philosophical tradition stretching from Spinoza through Deleuze, that posits that all matter is interconnected, in the process ofbecoming, and thus alive in a radically different sense of the word, by virtue of its vibrancy (Bennett 2010). By doing so, Bennett makes it possible to think across what are often accepted as differences: different cultures, yes; but also between the human and the post-human; and more radically, the living and the dead, since everything that vibrates is subsumed within an all-encompassing ecology.
In The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Ecology, and Economy, Frances Dyson likewise identifies a political substrate, but rather than sound or vibration, it is tone. Playing on the double meaning of tone as both a quality of sound and meaning (sense), Dyson reads a sense common to both ecology and economy in the sounds, or tones, that indexed key contemporary political moments (Dyson 2015). By focusing on tone, which can be harsh or discordant, Dyson introduces the possibility of incommensurability into what might otherwise be seen as a closed system of communication where the listening ear receives the sounds of the speaking voice—but only if it speaks in mellifluous tones. This resonates with Adriana Cavarero’s writing on voice and belonging (Cavarero 2007), where she suggests that communities are built on the relationships expressed by the intimacy of the enfleshed voice; moreover, that the unique, physical identity of the speaker, as rendered audible through the grain of their voice (Barthes 1981) determines whether the message can be heard. The voice and the ear are both posited as sites at which belonging and political subjectivity and struggle are produced.
Nearly twenty-five years later, Schafer makes the following arguably well-intended but equally problematic statement about an imagined merging of settler and indigenous identity:
”Task number one, forget where you came from; only then will you find out where you are … When you finally realize you come from Canada (with no strings attached) you find yourself brother and sister of the Indians and the Inuit. All your life you had denied this possibility based on ethnic grounds … now you discover that it is right and inevitable”
Key word: Country Music
is a genre of popular music that originated with blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, old-time, and American folk music forms including Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, and the cowboy Western music styles of New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country. Its popularized roots originate in the Southern and Southwestern United States of the early 1920s.
To be honest, I did not enjoy the ‘drums’ and I found it was very boring because of its slow speed and boring melodies.