This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global South, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-consumerist cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties. Conversations with: Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K. Mehta, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M. Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Isuru Kumarasinghe, Hemant Sreekumar.

This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global South, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-consumerist cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties. Conversations with: Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K. Mehta, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M. Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Isuru Kumarasinghe, Hemant Sreekumar.

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

The contributors to Remapping Sound Studies intervene in current trends and practices in sound studies by reorienting the field toward the global South. Attending to disparate aspects of sound in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Micronesia, and a Southern outpost in the global North, this volume broadens the scope of sound studies and challenges some of the field's central presuppositions. The contributors show how approaches to and uses of technology across the global South complicate narratives of technological modernity and how sound-making and listening in diverse global settings unsettle familiar binaries of sacred/secular, private/public, human/nonhuman, male/female, and nature/culture. Exploring a wide range of sonic phenomena and practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors offer diverse ways to remap and decolonize modes of thinking about and listening to sound. Contributors Tripta Chandola, Michele Friedner, Louise Meintjes, Jairo Moreno, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Jeff Roy, Jessica Schwartz, Shayna Silverstein, Gavin Steingo, Jim Sykes, Benjamin Tausig, Hervé Tchumkam

This book foregrounds that English monolingualism reduces both our linguistic and conceptual resources, presenting concepts from the cultures of 4 continents and 26 languages. Concepts seem to work best when created in the interspace between theory and praxis, and between philosophy, art, and science. Deleuze himself had generated many concepts in this encounter between philosophy and non-philosophy, including his ideas of affects and percepts, of becoming, the stutter, the rhizome, movement-image and time-image, the rhizome. What happens, if instead of "other disciplines," we take other cultures, other languages, other philosophies? Does not the focus on English as a hegemonic language of academic discourse deny us a plethora of possibilities, of possible Denkfiguren, of possible concepts? Each contributor explores ideas that are key to thinking in their language – about sound and silence, voice and image, living and thinking, the self and the world - while simultaneously addressing the issue of translation. Each chapter demonstrates that translation itself is a way of invention, rather than just a rendering of concepts from one system in terms of another. This collection acts as a travelogue. The journey does not follow a particular trajectory-some countries are not on the map; some are visited twice. So, there is no claim to completeness involved here-it is rather an invitation to answer to the call.

This book addresses a major gap in sound art scholarship: the role of audience participation. It offers a survey of participatory sound art from its origins in the historical avant-gardes to the non-institutionalized forms of sonic creativity in contemporary digital culture. In doing so, it proposes an innovative theoretical framework for analysing such phenomena, rooted in Pragmatist aesthetics, affordance theory and postcritique. Combining artwork analyses with qualitative studies, it focuses on three principal aspects of participatory sound art: the ways the materialities of the artworks facilitate and structure the participatory processes; the interplay of the creative agencies of the artists and the participants; and the postcritical approach to sound art’s politics, unfolding through the participants’ affective gestures. In considering these multiple dimensions, this book contributes to the growing fields of sound studies and participation studies, as well as to curatorial practice regarding sound art and participatory art.

The book discusses how division affect the fabric of cities, and people’s sense of identity and agency, and are reflected in physical features, architecture, and urban planning. The question of divided cities represents a complex and multistranded urban Ecology—at once both social and spatial; it cannot be limited to a single science or discipline, such as social or spatial fields. This suggests integrated and cross- disciplinary understandings, as well as integrated or parallel approaches and solutions. Urban ecologies of division manifest in multiple forms. One of their most palpable expressions is conflict, with parallels around the world, and often with correlations in the spatial fabric. Violence in such contexts is often a surface expression of deeper socio-economic or ideological differences. Whether as a result of intervention by authority or by dissent between groups, a divided city inevitably becomes a place of conflict in various forms and intensity, eroding the joy of living and sense of collective belonging to the detriment of all. In effect, it erodes the collective advantage of being part of a more unified society. A city exists in collections of social structures which mutually form a society. A divided city implies divided social structures and, in consequence, a divided society. The papers compiled in this book present many case studies of divided cities, discussing the different causes of divisions and their effects on societies. Some of the causes can be linked to conflicts, wars, colonialism, or legislative political systems. In response to the serious challenges resulting from these divisions, the book aims to provide opportunities for new approaches and possibilities for new interventions and solutions, making it significant to urban planners, architects, and policymakers.

The book's focus is the hegemonic role of so-called modernist, Western epistemology that spread in the wake of colonialism and the capitalist economic system, and its exclusion and othering of other epistemologies. Through a series of case studies the book discusses how the domination of Western epistemology has had a major impact on the epistemological foundation of the education systems across the globe. The book queries the sustainability of hegemonic epistemology both in the classrooms in the global South as well as in the face of the imminent ecological challenges of our common earth, and discusses whether indigenous knowledge systems would better serve the pupils in the global South and help promote sustainable development.

This book explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and services — a process referred to as softwarization. If ‘being creative’ has developed into one of the paradigmatic architectures of power for framing the contemporary subject, then an essential component of this architecture involves its material and symbolic configuration through tools. From image editors to digital audio workstations, video editors to game engines, these modern tools are used by creatives every day, and mastering these increasingly complex technologies is now a near-compulsory pathway to creative work. Despite their ubiquity in cultural production, few have sought to theorize them in aggregate and with interdisciplinary breadth. By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions in one volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. It makes a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries. ​

Living through the Covid-19 global pandemic has changed the way that we experience our lives, the way that we relate to one-another, and the way that we engage with the world. Focusing contextually on the initial lockdowns of the pandemic in 2020, this book proposes that art-based research has a central, illuminative role to play in our understanding of unfolding crises. The changes brought on by the global event may not be readily accessible or expressible through traditional academic research. Art-based research offers the opportunity to explore, document, and reflect on the emerging and often ineffable qualities of transformed lives by drawing on emotional, bodily, and interactive aspects of experience. Such an approach allows for meaning-making that makes room for reflexive, interpersonal, and dialogical engagement. The contributions aim to capture and explore lived experiences of the pandemic, as well as begin a discussion about how meaning-making is changing through and beyond the pandemic. This book further explores how the nature and practice of art-based research in itself has been challenged and transformed. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art education, art psychotherapy, consumer research, visual studies, cultural studies, and sociology.