I’ve had a deep dive into the web magazine, Seismograf and its special issue Fluid Sounds to clarify the definition of an audio paper. From what I’ve gathered, it is a fairly new medium that attempts to transcend conditioned notions of presentation and information access, specifically through sonic exploration and dissemination. It is unconventional in nature, not limited by an objective aesthetic or format and should serve as, not only a reflection of the topic at hand, but a “reflection of the reflection itself, that involves the process of knowledge production, presentation and representation” ( ). An experimental platform that extends the written academic text via audio production.
My key takeaways from the magazine’s manifesto are:
1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.
- It has the potential to assemble heterogeneous and segregated knowledge disciplines. For instance, it combines the rationality of language and speech with the sensation and affective materiality of the voice, or it incorporates the sound aesthetics of various environments, landscapes and spaces to underline and strengthen the academic argument
- It Incorporates the sound aesthetics of various environments, landscapes & spaces to underline and strengthen the academic argument.
- Performative aesthetics are used to develop a means of expression.
- Sounds and soundscapes become frameworks in which language performs
- The situational context of aesthetics, materiality, tone, timbre, rhythm and physicality support the narration or operate on their own, in contradiction to the presented statements and arguments
- Performative aesthetics recognise representation and presentation. That is, the relation between semantics and the mediation of dramaturgical elements (the performative gesture)
2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.
- It investigates environments – the social, the material and the sensorial – by taking several dynamics of the perceptual and analytical process into account.
- Our respective, individual and sensory idiosyncrasies are always at the core of our methodologies, but here this is emphasised through the mediation of sensory and non-sensory research.
P. Oliveira’s audio paper, ‘The New Amagerkaner’ is a sound ethnography of the fictional island of Amager’s urban and social development set in an imagined future. “Due to its speculative nature, the delivery of the paper assumes a storytelling format, in which (half) imaginary auditory worlds and speculative devices are presented to the listener as if already part of a distant past.” Through this the discourse and reflection investigates how listening devices might be deployed as tools for subversion and political resistance.
Here we see an example of listening as an epistemic practice. By listening back on these ‘auditory ghosts’ we are invited to take part in a research process that uses Amager as a case study. Oliveira’s mediation of academic discourse and sonic fiction to reflect on current and future technological articulations and listening strategies is idiosyncratic by nature. She brings her own aesthetic peculiarities and inventions to transmit her findings and propositions, using expanded sensibilities and provoking new situated events.
3. The audio paper is situated and partial.
- Site specificity as a tool for research and presentation.
- Situated implies that the sound work is composed with sound from the environments from which they engage.
- Situated and partial knowledge also implies that the production is restricted by its means of production: technologies, tools, media, places and contexts.
- The audio paper draws attention to the knowledge situation by, for instance, reflecting on the means of production.
This is particularly evident in A. Baixinho and T. Blom’s audio paper ‘Mountain meets urban waterfront’. By combining field recordings from Hallingskarvet mountain and an urban waterfront atmosphere, with the site-specific real-time sounds of Islands Brygge, they explore how the pre-existing aural environment integrates with the invading sonic composition. An experiment in sounds as place-making. There is no escaping the situational limitations of the soundscapes used. However, when combined a new perspective is created, and differences both merge and become known.
4. The audio paper evokes affects and sensations.
- Feelings and sensations are present in the audio paper and work side by side with the semantics of language and sound.
- The aesthetic, material aspects of the audio paper produce affects and sensations in the listener.
- sonic materiality induces presence.
- The relation between cognitive reason and bodily sensations.
- It does not represent lived processes so much as it participates in actively shaping processes.
- Academic knowledge that is felt and processed temporally.
The audio paper ‘Hearing on the verge: cuing and aligning with the movement of the audible’ is a clear representative of temporal experience. We are engaged by listening to another’s movement. We are transported from our, perhaps, present mundane sensory affectations, and transported to a different sonic context. We explore the semantics of listening in movement here, through both academic reflection and bodily sensation. Our engagement is intensified and given a different dimension. An expanded mode of listening across space-time and across situated milieu of hearing.
5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.
- It is not necessarily narrated from the perspective of a one dimensional protagonist.
- Research questions and arguments are developed within academic frameworks, while the presentation can take various forms.
- Dramaturgical complexities that not only function as a representational and performative tool but also integrates the overall academic argument in the representation itself.
We see this in the A. Führer’s audio paper called The Map is Not The Territory D’Or; a score for a soundwalk in the town of Roskilde, Denmark. He not only relies on his narration, but also incorporates other sound materials, these being 1) an interview in Danish with the artist, 2) a voice over of a theoretical text in English, and 3) recordings from performances of the piece, including walking, breathing exercises, and the sounds of ventilation systems and other environmental sound. “The paper does not offer a hermeneutic interpretation of Führer’s piece; rather it is a performative appropriation that uses the piece as a machine for experimenting with the relations between artist and theorist, artwork, embodied experience and academic representation, all of which are categories rendered somewhat problematic by the format of the audio paper itself.”
6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.
- Not limited to narrations performed by human beings
- Landscapes, objects, technologies and politics are rendered active agents.
This can be seen in ‘Mountain meets urban waterfront’, where the contents of the soundscapes themselves do most of the storytelling.
7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technology together in mediation.
- With reference to Bruno Latour (1999), Chris Salter explains it this way: “Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all are deeply entangled.
- This frame of understanding underlines the awareness that recording equipment, filtering, mixing, mastering and conversions are not neutral processes and tools. They are in themselves expressions of various actors and aesthetic means.
8. The audio paper is a constituent part of broader ecologies.
- It depends on diverse sound environments and human practices in its attempt to assemble aspects, narratives, phenomena and sensations of the world.
- Always incorporates an awareness of the process of research and technological production
- It not only reflects its own research question/s, but reflects the reflection itself: the process of knowledge production, the presentation and representation of language and voice, the narrative and dramaturgy, and the aesthetics of sound.
The elements required to bring a research paper alive with sound invite the narrator/ creator to choose carefully how these elements portray the information as there should be a constant awareness of aesthetics, both personal and impersonal.
Reflection
I find the aural papers offered by Seismograf in ‘Fluid Sounds’ intriguing and thought-provoking. They challenge our conditioning to only receive information and ask us to interact with and experience sources of knowledge in a different way. However, the avant garde nature of these papers strikes me as potentially inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the sound arts canon. Some questions that remain are: Does the current definition of an aural paper extend to topics that, not only analyse the nature of sound, in of itself, but use sound to explore other mediums? Where do we draw the line between an aural paper and a podcast. Does a podcast with performative aesthetics count as an aural paper, and is self-referential awareness always necessary. While Seimsograf’s manifesto is very in depth, I am still a little confused as to the where one might draw the line between between an audio paper and other similar sonic mediums. Nevertheless, the encouragement of performativity and personal aesthetic excites me as a means to step outside of conventional boxes with my final project, using syntax, tempo, time, voice, sound and music to express my research question.
Auditory evidence can include, but is not limited to:
- Experimental sound pieces
- Soundscape compositions
- Narrative podcasts and other radio formats
- Performance lectures
- Aural poetry