English

We invite researchers and artists from all areas to submit proposals for the 2nd International Conference on Sonorities Research – CIPS to be held online between June 9 and 11, 2021. Just as its first edition, the second CIPS encourages the integration of different fields of knowledge related to sound and its practices.

​

The theme of this edition is “Borderline Sonorities,” which emphasizes the different relations between both musical and sound practices assimilated and crystallized in different social, political and historical contexts, as well as practices that, by many reasons, are either excluded or considered secondary within the current globalized model of mediatic production and circulation. The notion of frontier emphasizes the processes of stiffening and flexibilization of the systems which structure contemporary sonorities, and which we aim to discuss. 

​

Attendees will have the privilege of watching Meki Nzewi (University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria) and Samantha Bennet (Australian National University, Australia) as keynote speakers. The event also features artistic performances and talks by Fabiana Faleiros (Pelotas, Brasil), biarritzzz (Recife, Brasil) e Pedro Asaphan (Belo Horizonte, Brasil).

 

Schedule:

 

• April, 18th - Deadline for abstract submission (for both scientific and artistic works)

• April, 29th - Acceptance/Rejection letters

• May, 17h - Official programme

• June, 9-11th - Conference

 

Registration is open (with early bird option up to Apr. 30th). Click here to register.

 

​

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

 

Abstracts must be submitted to the email cips.sonoridades@gmail.com in .doc (or .docx) formats, stating in the subject of the email “II CIPS”, followed by the intended WG (the indication of the WG in the “subject” field is mandatory).

The abstract must be formatted in Times New Roman font, Body 12, spacing 1.5. The file must contain, in this order:

• Proposal title;

• Authors and their respective e-mails and institutional affiliation (or main activity);

• Summary of up to 500 words;

• Three to five keywords;

• Intended WG.

Abstracts can be sent in Portuguese, Spanish or English. Some WG will conduct moderation in only two of these languages, but this is indicated in the group's description.

 

CALL FOR ARTISTIC PERFORMANCES

 

The 2nd CIPS is receiving proposals for artistic performances that approach and problematize the conference main theme: "borderline sonorities". Works of all kinds are to be evaluated, with the condition that they are submitted as video files and adequate for the videoconference sessions. They must be up to 10 minutes long.

 

Proposals for artistic performances are to be submitted until to cips.sonoridades@gmail.com, in .doc or .docx files, with the message subject “II CIPS - Performances”.

The text formatting should be in Times New Toman, size 12, with a 1,5 line spacing. It must comprehend:

• Proposal title;

• Author(s), their respective e-mail address and institutional filiation (or main activity);

• Description;

• Technique/Format

• Indication of the type of performance (live or pre-recorded)

• Performance duration

• Mini-biography of the authors of up to 100 words each

 

 

WORKING GROUPS DESCRIPTIONS

 

 

WG 1: SOUNDS, TECHNOLOGIES AND DECOLONIALITY

Coordination: José Cláudio Castanheira (UFSC) & Melina Santos (PUC-RS)

 

The Sounds, Technologies and Decoloniality Working Group welcomes proposals that reflect on the various instances of sound / musical production-circulation from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial thinking proposes a critical look at the hegemonic forms of knowledge production and oppression of identities, ethnicities, gender, division of labor and the organization of culture originated in colonial constructions of European-American-centered thought. The interactions between all these processes constitute societies, cultures and globalization and capitalist contexts, as well as access and restrictions to technologies.

Regarding the different technological environments: the techniques of musical production in studios, the parameters for the manufacture of musical instruments, the widespread use of audio editing software, and the way in which access and control of such infrastructure are provided work within a dynamic that we could call “technocolonialism”.

Sounds, Technologies and Decoloniality Working Group proposes a dialogue between approaches concerning the inequalities of class, gender or race present in sonic/musical manifestations - within technological conditions and environments - in which access and mastery over structures of production and circulation are also a determining factor.

Some suggestions for topics (but not limited to) are:

• Interseccional relations in musical production, circulation, and consumption.

• Uses, access and power relations within technological discourses and apparatuses.

• Formal structures (theories, classificatory notions such as “gender”, cultural and musical heritage, etc.) and listening models.

• Tensions between multiculturalism and recording industry.

 

 

 

WG 2: SONORITIES-SPACIALITIES

Coordination: Dulce Mazer (UFRGS) and Pedro Marra (UFES/UFOP)

 

By articulating the terms “acoustics” and “epistemology”, Steven Feld proposes in the 1980s the concept of acustemology, aiming to describe geographically located listening as a form of knowing space and the relations between human and non-human beings that inhabit it. Sounds - including music - are understood as mediators between these agents, places and forms of knowledge. As they occupy spaces with their weight, size and directionality, sounds can be  modulated in the practices that produce, share, lot or dispute places. In this sense, a bar or a coffee shop can use music to create an ambience or atmosphere, an affective space, which favors the sociability within it. Human, animal or natural sounds delimit the borders of the places they inhabit. Sounds are also devices through which visually impaired people ecolocate themselves in the urban public space and realize that they have reached their destination.

In addition to the temporal dimension that is usually primarily attributed to the realm of sound, the audible world also has a spatial dimension that reverberates surfaces, distances and volumes. Those features make possible capturing the movement and the rhythms that animate social life in place through sounds that resonate in it. Sonic, audio and listening technologies, instruments, artifacts and devices, expand the possibilities of the human hearing experience and shape our understanding of the natural environment that surrounds us.

The Sonorities-spatialities WG addresses these issues in a broad perspective in order to discuss investigations that mobilize varied theoretical and methodological frameworks to address sonorities, spaces and different places. Thus, proposals that deal with the following issues (but not only) will be accepted:

• Sonorities and production of the place, its senses and affections.

• Sound, space occupation and political disputes.

• Sonorities and territorialities.

• Disabilities, ableism and echolocation.

• Ecological and interspecies relationships through sound.

 

 

 

WG 3: SONIC BOUNDARIES AND NOMADISMS

Coordination: Camila Proto (PUC-RJ), Cássio de Borba Lucas (UFRGS), Marcelo B. Conter (IFRS), Mario Arruda (UFRGS)

 

What is a border capable of? How is it established? Irreducible to the static division of a hard wall, the margin of a territory is also a soft line, or maybe a lava stream which produces multiple margins… A border presupposes both rigidity and nomadism. It is an agent: positioned as to operate translations and irritations within the structures it intends to protect. There may be sonic borders; borders that translate sounds; sounds that act as or in the borders. From this perspective, we are invited to ask: what is it that produces the border and what does the border produce? To conceive borders as mobile places, in constant displacement, permeated by traveling bodies, floating signs and nomadic sounds. Nomadic sounds are those which roam beneath and above an existing territory, which disrupt frontiers and make them porous, in its typical movement of surpassing, overtaking. These sounds are sets of singular relations which extrapolate sonic topologies made of available musical genres and identities. After all, sounds defy borders: like desire and expression in a violent flight, they invent slippery territories of signs and affects.

Sonic boundaries and nomadisms WG is transdisciplinary and opened to projects that problematize sounds as borders and borders as sounds, seeking to consider its territories as cartographies that dynamize the potentialities and meanings of the sonic realm via the following (non-exclusive) approaches and objectives:

• Investigating the semiotic borders which trace themselves in the quotidian sonic processes, and which inform the plasticity of musical listening (pragmaticist, discursive, translational and systemic semiotics).

• Diagrammatizing the border machines which establish translations between signifying and asignifying systems of sound (machinisms and mechanosphere).

• Describing the affective logic, which sometimes conjugate and sometimes interdicts the aberrant connections between human and nonhuman actors, chaotic noises and codified sounds (affective turn).

• Reflecting on the sonic borders as actual and virtual processes of differentiation (philosophies of difference).

• Understanding sonic nomadisms through media theories, materialities and the notion of Archive (archeology of knowledge).

• Centralizing mediatic and artistic phenomena in light of the spectra that reterritorialize and deconstruct sonic borders (hauntology).

 

 

 

WG 4: SONO-SORO[RITIES]: FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN SOUND ART

Coordination: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (Simon Fraser University),  Freya Zinovieff (Simon Fraser University)  & Amanda Gutiérrez (Concordia University)

 

Building on Marcela Lagarde’s concept of sororidad (2006), understood as a non-binary, ethical, political and practical dimension of contemporary feminism(s), in this working group, we consider sono-soro[rities] as a critical frame to look at the sonic dimensions of patriarchy. As a feminist intervention in the archives of sound art, sono-soro[rities] makes visible how sound and gender constructions intersect each other. It highlights the potential of the sonic to unveil and make audible unequal power dynamics in which gendered violence and exclusion are perpetuated. We seek to listen to what sono-soro[rities] sounds like and explore its political potential in creating non-exclusionary-sounding futures and re-sounding pasts and presents. To do so, we invite historical and theoretical papers and research-creation projects that make visible the contributions of women and LGTBQ artists in sound art, including (but not limited to) composition, technological invention, media arts, radio and podcast productions, as well as other projects that have opened, created, and disseminated feminist and independent spaces for sound production across the globe. We welcome papers in Spanish, English and Portuguese, but the panel will be moderated in Spanish and English. 

 

 

 

WG 5: SOUND AND MUSIC IN DIGITAL CULTURES

Coordination: Paula Gomes-Ribeiro (CESEM-NOVA de Lisboa) & João Francisco Porfírio (CESEM-NOVA de Lisboa)

​

It is a common argument that, together with the globalization of the economy, digital media have significantly contributed to the growth of a transnational model for the circulation of cultural goods. The popularization and expansion of the Internet and mobile listening equipment and formats, as well as the increment of artificial intelligence at the service of the production and dissemination of sound and music, have transformed the systems of production, distribution and consumption of music and sound in a particularly fast way. These changes have had even more expression in the recent situation of pandemic and confinement.

As it is essential to observe critically and in detail the behavior of cultural formats and models, phenomena, agents and communities, in the context of the networks and communication systems that frame and structure them, we invite the submission of works that investigate practices, discourses and sound, musical and audiovisual content in the contemporary digital landscape. We seek for papers that problematize the multiple relationships between sound, music and cyberspace as essential elements of culture production today.

This WG covers phenomena such as: the production and availability of playlists in spaces such as Spotify; the proliferation of videos associated with major publishers or in DIY mode; sharing and discussing music and discourses about musical tastes in social media; the intense expansion of streaming of all types of shows; the multiplicity of online communities of appreciation, sharing (and sometimes co-production) of musical subgenres and other sound manifestations; the uses of music and sound in a variety of products such as audiovisuals made available on Instagram, Facebook or Tik Tok; the way in which artificial intelligence is used by companies and other entities in conducting music choices and personalized soundscapes in everyday life, among other themes. We welcome abstracts in Portuguese, Spanish and English, but the panel will be moderated in Portuguese and English.

 

 

 

WG 6: WHERE IS THE OTHER? SOUND-BASED EPISTEMOLOGIES AND SONIC IMAGINATIONS

Coordination: Thaís Aragão (UFC), Rui Chaves (UFPB), Juliana Carla Bastos (UFPB),  Henrique Souza Lima (USP)

 

Knowing a sound, knowing with sound: these two epistemological models are part of an ever-expanding disciplinary leitmotif (i.e. sound studies) trying to lay down the necessary groundwork for new concepts and methodological approaches. In this regard, we wish to instigate reviews to how this corpus of scholarship is being produced, including the epistemic status granted to sound as an object of study.  We start with this question: how do researchers act in relation/response to the axiological “other” in research? How does the one doing the observing or discussion encompasses the other being observed within a non-hierarchical and place-bound paradigm? This means knowing who these people are and what temporalities and territories they inhabit. New tools might be needed in order to follow through on these questions. We would like to evoke the possibility of creating critical fabulations or using a sonic imagination, conceptual approaches geared towards the intersubjective, empathy,  multivocal and non-essentialist thinking. Sound as an object of study becomes enmeshed in ecologies of knowledge. A wealth of sonic epistemologies that offers unique perspectives from the Global South.

For instance, in Latin America, we can testify a wealth of sonic skills, frequently practiced by individuals in precarious socio-economic conditions but with relevant micro and macro-political implications that deserve an attentive debate. Thus, there is a need for a critical onlook that can and should be instigated by an imaginative and speculative approach that investigates the limitations of current sound-based epistemologies (i.e. theories and/or methodologies), while offering new perspectives in a relational and locational framework. Thus, we invite the submission of proposals that tackle the below topics:

• Concepts of medium/media, noise and materialities in interface with sound.

• Reviewing epistemic aspects in and of acoustic ecology: from the soundscape frame to the dynamism inherent in sound.

• Methodological discussions of sound-based ethnographies dedicated to forms of knowing-with, blurring outdated models of scientific objectivity.

• The sonic fiction as a research method: other earshots, speculations and sonic knowledges and histories outside the current (neo)colonial epistemes.

• Can the subaltern have sonic agency? Describing collaborative practice-based research with communities while amplifying denied forms of cultural expression and sonic resistance.

• The insurgent “archive”: redefining sound heritage, constructing post-representational cartographies and offering polyphonic accounts of cosmopolitan societies.

• Sonic philosophies from the Global South: other ways to activate philosophy to think sounds.

• The exploitation of labour and natural resources: the missing link in sound studies scholarship.