Last week I’ve recorded a podcast together with Francesco Aletta, Tin Oberman and Andrew Mitchell in London based on my latest book Engaging With Everyday Sounds. Will be broadcast soon.
Archives for category: Philosophy
See the ad for this position (0.2 fte) at Leiden U here. You should apply before March 1!!!!
I’m happy to announce that my new (e-)book “Engaging with Everyday Sounds” is now freely available. Please go to https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0288 to download the book in various formats.
‘Engaging With Everyday Sounds’ explores the role of sounds in everyday life, including their impact on human actions, emotions, and imagination. I intertwine sonic studies with philosophy, sound art, sociology and more to create an innovative guide to sonic materialism, calling for a re-sensitization to our acoustic environment and arguing that everyday sounds have (micro)political, social, and ethical impact to which we should attend.
Exploring the intellectual history of sound studies as well as local, global, and temporal sonic geographies, I weave audio files, images, and journal excerpts into this work to create a multimodal monograph that explores the relationships of humans, nonhumans, and their environments through sound. The book contains an interdisciplinary collection of short essays, which might be valuable reading for both academics and the general reader interested in sound studies, sound art, philosophy, or the sociology of everyday life—and for anyone keen to think about the sonic in new and engaging ways.
On December 6, 2021 I hosted a special event in Studio Loos in The Hague (the Netherlands) on Sonic Materialism. Featuring the American trombone player, theoretician, and instrument builder Kevin Fairbairn, the Welsh composer and improviser Richard Barrett, and the Argentinian sound artist and composer Gabriel Paiuk, the event was comprised of 3 lecture-performances (and a brief introduction by me), exploring how Sonic Materialism can sound, how sound as sound can contribute to a more theoretical discourse on (New) Materialism.
A registration of this event can be found here
Today two new books arrived, both containing an essay of mine. The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy includes my reflections on (everyday) listening; my contribution to Ethics and Christian Musicking is called “The Silence of the Monks” and takes as its point of departure the friary of the Carthusian order in a French monastery. The monks are not allowed to speak but of course always surrounded by (and themselves producing) sound.
Recently published: Musik, die Wissen schafft. Perspektiven kunstlerischer Musikforschung, edited by Arnold Jacobshagen. The book contains many interesting essays, from Darla Crispin, John Rink, Deniz Peters, and Barthold Kuijken, among others. Also a text by me, entitled “Kunstlerische Forschung und Klangkunst im offentlichen Stadtraum” about sound artworks in public urban spaces by Max Neuhaus, Peter Cusack, Edwin van der Heide, and Asa Stjerna in relation to micropolitics and sonic materialism.
Just to let you know that my online PhD dissertation from 2002 – Deconstruction in Music – is completely renewed. See here!
This book fell this morning on my door mat. It contains great essays by Michael Schwab, Jonathan Impett, Juan Parra, Mieko Kanno and many others … and one by me too: “Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces.”
From the article: “It is the aim of this chapter to expand and examine in more detail how artistic research and sound art relate to one another. To do so, I will concentrate on several existing sound art works, all situated in public urban spaces. The main reason for this demarcation is that working on and with public urban spaces often requires more “research” from the sound artist than producing a so-called autonomous, non-site-specific art work. I will try to answer questions such as: How do sound artists contribute towards developments in the arts as well as knowledge production? Which spaces of research and which methodological tools do they use? Which new concepts have they developed? It is my hope that this chapter will show that artistic research and sound studies—both still marginal (and marginalised) in current academic fields—contribute in significant and unique ways towards rethinking our being-in-and-with-the-world.”
In what follows I pay attention to Max Neuhaus, Peter Cusack, Edwin van der Heide, and Asa Stjerna, and connect their work to micropolitics and sonic materialism.
This text is a slightly reworked version of a keynote speech I gave in Aveiro (Portugal) during the PERFORMA 2015 Conference on Musical Performance, organized by the University of Aveiro, the Institute of Ethnomusicology (INET-MD), and the Brazilian Association of Musical Performance (ABRAPEM).
I was asked to contribute an essay to the 50th issue of the Serbian journal New Sound. And also because my wife is Serbian I decided to write a sonic postcard from Belgrade in which (Serbian) sounds, sound art, and musics converge. See: http://www.newsound.org.rs/pdf/en/ns50/21.M.Cobussen.pdf
Thinking Sounds 