Global Sonic Culture
Introduction about doing Sensory Ethnography
Pink outlines a way of thinking about and doing ethnography that takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice. Sensory ethnography is used across scholarly, practice-based and applied disciplines. It develops an approach to the world and to research that accounts for how sensory ways of experiencing and knowing are integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practise our craft.
Ethnography is a type of qualitative research that involves immersing yourself in a particular community or organization to observe their behavior and interactions up close. The word “ethnography” also refers to the written report of the research that the ethnographer produces afterwards.
Ethnography is a flexible research method that allows you to gain a deep understanding of a group’s shared culture, conventions, and social dynamics. However, it also involves some practical and ethical challenges.
Bibliography:
Kermani, E. (2009) Sonic Soma: Sound, body and the origins of the Alphabet. New York: Schirmacher
Paperback – 15 Jan 2009 | 204 pages | ISBN-10: 0981946216 | ISBN-13: 978-0981946214
In Sonic Soma Elise Kermani traces the history of mankind from the origins of society and language to the present, and un-mutes the silence that resulted from forgetting, or refusing to hear, our own mythology ‘right-side-up’. SonicSoma reunites the system of ‘vibration/matter’, ‘sound/medium’, and the double helix form of ‘mind/body’ which was split at the moment man began to write his history instead of listening to her story.Composer and multimedia artist Elise Kermani is the Director of IshtarLab Recordings, a publisher of experimental sound art, and the President of MiShinnah Productions, a non-profit organization that produces non-commercial film, music and visual art. She lives and works in New York City and also spends quality time thinking and writing at her home in Delmar, in upstate New York.
Leppert, R. (1995) The Sight of SoundMusic, Representation, and the History of the Body.
Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality.
With the support of 100 illustrations, Leppert addresses music and the production of racism, the hoarding of musical sound in a culture of scarcity, musical consumption and the policing of gender, the domestic piano and misogyny, music and male anxiety, and the social silencing of music. His unexpected yoking of musicology and art history, in particular his original insights into the relationships between music, visual representation, and the history of the body, make exciting reading for scholars, students, and all those interested in society and the arts.
Richard Leppert is Professor of Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (1989).
Henriques, J. (2011) Sonic Bodies : Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. Britain: Bloomsbury
The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, every night, sound systems stage dancehall sessions for the crowd to share the immediate, intensive and immersive visceral pleasures of sonic dominance. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature sound of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful “sets” of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks to play; and MCs(DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd.
Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall “vibes” are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates – at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in a disembodied mind, that communication is an exchange of information, and that meaning is only ever representation.
Brooks, L. M, (1993). ‘Harmony in Space:’ A Perspective on the Work of Rudolf Laban, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 27 (2):29 (1993)
Schechner, R. (2006) Performance Studies: An introduction. 4th edition. New York: Routledge
Each performance is specific and different from every other. The difference is made to enact the conventions and traditions of a genre, the personal choices made by the performers, directors, and authors, various cultural patterns, historical circumstances, and the particularities of reception.
My essay topic might be:
- The relationship of music and body movements
2. How sonic scores related to body movements
3. A critical analysis of contemporary sound design in pantomime