sonification

While Covid-19 may have fractured our public, private, and professional narratives of normalcy, out of this slow-moving and surreal catastrophe, new images of the future imaginary began to emerge, as well as new creative practices for collaborative (re)imagining. The Digital Literacy Centre is a collective of researcher/academic/artists at the University of British Columbia who are interested in exploring innovative approaches to literacy, digital media research, and experimental methodologies for technologically enriched meaning-making practices and collaboration. Like everyone in the world, each of us in the DLC experienced the pandemic individually as a diffracted and intensely intimate encounter and yet also collectively, as a shared story, one that we were narrating together in real time, however virtually. We decided to take up this evolving pandemic moment as a technological and creative research challenge to engage with the innovative digital platforms at our disposal towards collaborative futures imagining during a time of crisis. Skunk Tales is the result— a multimodal, collaborative futures fiction that we wrote/composed/sonified/and performed in chapters that map an imagined future of human interactions with literate technologies.In this paper, we describe a collaborative, technologically-mediated storying methodology that enacts “the diffraction patterns that arise when specific aural experiences are rubbed against specific narrations of human-technological coupling” (Cecchetto, 2013, p. 3). During our storying sessions, we simultaneously sonified the emergent narrative data using Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musial Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software. We developed Singling for the sonification and visceralization of textual data in qualitative research and analysis. Capable of sounding discrete characters, symbols, and punctuation, as well as word forms in lexicogrammatical categories of English language texts, Singling transforms text into user-determined soundscapes. As we wrote Skunk Tales, we invited the emergent soundings to permeate the futures imagining and become entangled with the movements of the narrative. As Cecchetto (2013) argued, “It is precisely the forceful quality of sound that makes it an agent of modulation that can help to amplify certain elements of narratives of human-technological coupling, making them audible” (p. 4). This paper maps our creative futures research generation that is informed by technological posthumanism and how “different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification… initiat[ing] new experience of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (Hayles, 1993, p. 69). Sound permeates the methodology and the resulting diffracted narratives, both theoretically, materially, and thematically.We first began the narrative face to face, in the early days of the pandemic, and then diffracted outwards into social isolation and virtual jam sessions; we extended the narrative beyond the limits of our collective and into a storying performance at the 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group virtual conference, during which we wrote and sonified a chapter live in virtual space. As such, Skunk Tales is a pandemic tale, sounding the evolution of a future now receding into the past, while simultaneously signifying new possibilities for dynamic arts-based conversations between subjectivities, technologies, sounds, and meanings.

(Source: authors' own abstract)

When Ezra Pound exchanged his initial affinities for the fin-de-siècle decadence of pre-war London poetics for a growing interest in mediaeval troubadour traditions, he was looking beyond innovations in literary form and technique; there is ample evidence in much of his critical writing even at this early stage in his career that the poet was seeking a more philosophical relationship between representation, social ethos and cultural meaning. In the song and musical customs of the troubadour, as cultivated within the “Romance” languages and traditions of southern Europe, Pound identified a rare instance where an artwork’s material form inspired shared cultural sensibilities that transcended any and all context specific references or allusions. Exemplary of this level of aesthetic idealism in the troubadour romance, for Pound, are the songs of the 13th century Tuscan poet, Guido Cavalcanti (d.1300). Cavalcanti’s remarkably precise dedication to the structure and rhythm of the line, Pound informs us, demonstrates equally the “science of the music of words and the knowledge of their magical powers” (1912). This unique combination in Cavalcanti’s work of formal method with aesthetic poignancy, further, helped inspire almost half a millennium of active debates on the nature of love, becoming just as relevant to early 20th century thought as it was to mediaeval scholarship hundreds of years earlier. “Behind the narratives” of these songs, Pound summarizes in a later critical essay entitled “Psychology and Troubadours” (1916), there runs a surprisingly modern appreciation for verbal and semantic structure as a basis for common cultural attitudes: in his words, “behind the canzos, the ‘love code’.”

Historically speaking, Pound’s own formalism has prompted extensive critical interest in the visual dimensions of his poetry; yet we can see just as clearly in his writing a distinct pairing of form with a much more inclusive blend of multiple sensual and technical effects. The resulting aesthetic appeal is usually categorized by Pound (again, referencing Cavalcanti) in terms of musicality. As both a concept and also a mode of representation, musicality infers the merging of, not just a work’s visual and aural properties, but rather all of its tactile traits, culminating in the complete integration of form with substance. To be musical, in Pound’s view, is quite literally to realize the full material coherence of sensual experience intermixed with intellectual reflection; while sound in and of itself signifies very select levels of engagement and understanding within and throughout culture. Such import seems increasingly patent as culture comes to depend upon new media formats, becoming almost standard in much contemporary electronic literature. Speaking to the value of audio technologies in much of his best media work, artist and programmer Jim Andrews reasons that “written words and sentences do not have easy access to the primal or the harmonic/dissonant reveries of pure sound … [for example,] the meaningful repetition, variance, trance, and pattern of the drum” (“Nio & The Art of Interactive Audio for the Web,” 2001); in a similar vein, hypertext author and literary theorist Deena Larsen notes that because “sounds provide tone, rhythm, meter, and tension,” they form “an integral part of meaning in electronic literature” (“Fun da mentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature,” 2012).

Moving from fields of literary and cultural study to the sciences, we find many parallel associations of sound with a distinct structural integrity in meaning in contemporary theories of sonification. Here, much like Pound’s concept of musicality, sonic recordings are understood to provide highly tactile and thus almost immanent tracings of various concrete processes in the world. The resulting discourses based on such information acquire a profound material weight as objective or evidentiary knowledge. One only has to consider the level of validity popularly attributed to representational technologies like sonar, Geiger counters and, of course, EKG machines when processing data for a particular discipline. In this panel, the concept as well as the procedural use of sound to analyze and represent complex data sets will be surveyed as important points of interrogation in contemporary electronic art practices.

Each of the following presentations will isolate various contemporary challenges to aesthetics regarding the instrumental use of digital sound for computational frameworks of scientific knowledge, critically analyzing how auditory technologies may promote new degrees of cultural positivism within an ever evolving aural economy. The love code Pound alludes to in his reading of Troubadour musicality on one level suggests a sonic enigma well worth decrypting; at the same time, Pound’s aesthetic appreciation of complex harmonic structures also implies a mode of interpretation–a listening, say–where engagement inherently defies rationalized, categorical understandings.

Presentation 1: Sound Interruptions
Andrew Klobucar, Ph.D.
(Associate Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ)

Presentation 2: Gibber
Angela Rawlings (M.A., University of Iceland)

Presentation 3: Troubadours & Troublemakers
Jeff T. Johnson, MFA
(New School, NYC, NY)

Presentation 4: “The Gift: Lyricism and Texture after the Song”
Christopher Strofolino, Ph.D.
(Los Angeles, CA)

(Source: Author's abstract)