D.4.1 Listening Together/Apart: Sound as (Affective) Pandemic Archival Medium

• Emily Collins, York University

Sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, but they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to archival projects and practice. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences more broadly, and yet many scholars argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, affective relations, ways of producing knowledge, and attuning to neglected histories (Gershon 2013; Goh 2017; Hagood 2019; Peterson and Brennan 2020). When the COVID-19 global pandemic hit, news reports and studies throughout the world began citing drastic reductions in noise pollution in urban centres, AI recordings of cellphone coughs, shifting soundscapes at home from new routines and work settings, and sonic sensitivities cultivated in quarantine and isolation. In response to this wealth of sonic research and information, an outpouring of calls – academic, artistic, and research-based – for sound recordings and contributions to digital archival sound projects followed.

This paper considers the surge in archival activities foregrounding sound during the pandemic and the ways in which sound can be used as both a critical medium and a way to generate intimacy and proximity in moments of seclusion, uncertainty, and despair. Through an analysis of projects, including The Pandemic Sensory Archive, Sounds of Pandemia, and #StayHomeSounds, I position sound as a key medium for archival practice which generates not only a sense of embodied reality but also gestures towards new possibilities in digital contexts where sound represents a vector for imagination, immersion, and collective belonging in otherwise surreal, detached, and disconnected situations. In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, I argue that new configurations of personhood and subjectivities emerge through new forms of affective archival sonic engagements.

Gershon, Walter (2013). “Vibrational Affect: Sound Theory and Practice in Qualitative Research.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, XX(X): 1-6.
Goh, Annie (2017). “Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics.” Parallax, 3: 282-304.
Hagood, Mack (2019). Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peterson, Marina, and Vicki Brennan (2020). “A Sonic Ethnography: Listening To and With Climate Change.” Resonance, 1(4): 371–375.

keywords: sound studies, archives, affect, embodiment, critical practice

D.4.2 Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land

Michelle Wilson, University of Western Ontario

There are sounds in the archive, and there are also silences. For everything we can hear or read in an archive, there are just as many questions about what has not been included and who has been left out. In this presentation, Michelle Wilson discusses her research-creation practice and commitment to audio work as a form of scholarship through the example of her interactive textile map, Forced Migration. In this work, Wilson stitches together organic and technological material to memorialize specific bison killed, captured, or bred in an effort to save the species from extinction. Each silver thread in the work honours one of the bison captured and controlled in this conservation effort. When viewers touch these strands, it triggers a corresponding audio story; not a straightforward narrative but a glimpse at the places, beings (human and non-human) and tales that have shaped our current relationships with bison. Wilson embraces a ficto-critical approach to archival records in these audio artworks to produce an embodied, speculative history of a familial line of bison. With the help of sound designer Angus Cruikshank and poet Síle Englert, Wilson has developed a collage of critically interpreted stories that open a listener's empathetic imagination. These stories strive to grapple with colonialism's impacts and give voice to the more-than-human characters at the heart of the research. Additionally, Wilson will discuss two different modalities she has used to disseminate this work, first in the exhibition GardenShip and State at Museum London and second as an episode of the literary podcast SpokenWeb.

keywords: ficto-criticism, anti-colonial, audio art, speculative

D.4.3 Room Tones – Bodily responses to building and auditing the (sound) archive

Debashis Sinha, Toronto Metropolitan University

In my presentation, I offer my own experiences working with a growing archive of sound (and sound responses) that have a genesis in personally collected field recordings from Kolkata, India. There has been a growing shift in the practice of field recording to accept first-person perspective in the act of recording, where the presence of the recordist is understood and sometimes highlighted in the collection and apprehension of the material. Alongside and extending from this shift (and embedded in my own practice) is also the performative focus of building the sound archive – that recording can and further should be intimately connected to impulse, desire, instinct rather than be an extractive data gathering exercise. The resulting recordings hold power and embed intention that then engenders further interventions based on the story of the moment of recording, inventions which are connected bodily to the material in a deep and authentic way. Ultimately, accepting the presence and actions of the archive-gatherer as a vector of information in the resulting material allows for a wider range of response on the part of the researcher, as well as confirming as valid methods of research that broaden the field of archive studies in general.

I argue that recording, intervening in, and auditing recordings made in this way prioritize practices of mindfulness, respect, and care in archive building, and allow us to apprehend our own (and others’) materials in deeper ways, beyond assumptions of the archive as solely repositories of hard data or information.

keywords: field recording, listening, storytelling, sonic arts