Organised by Søren Møller Sørensen, Torben Sangild, Erik Granly and Brandon LaBelle.

For more details:
http://www.hum.ku.dk/klik/English%20version%202007/courses_workshops_auditory.htm

Venue: University of Copenhagen / Amager

Date: November 28-30

Registration: Please submit proposals/abstracts of 200 words for possible presentations by September 1st to Kirsten Zeuthen. The proposals will be reviewed by the conference organizers, and the applicant can expect an answer by September 15th. The conference language is English. There is no fee for participating. Please note that we cannot offer financial or practical support for travel and accommodation. We will, however, be happy to provide letters of support for those applying for travel funds from their own institutions.

The aim of the conference Sound, Art, Auditory Cultures is to further interdisciplinary research in aural experience. Experience of our environments through sound, and development of methods for culturally and historically informed research in this experience, are the central topics to be discussed.

Interdisciplinary sound studies can profit from a broad array of methodological approaches and from close interaction with contemporary music and sound art. Since the 1970s the soundscape movement has been engaged in the registration of quotidian auditory environments and in the same period the fertile practice of sound art has developed into a highly valuable laboratory for the investigation of sound’s multiple forms of presence and effect. In conjunction, sound continues to find a significant place within performance practice, with an emphasis on voice and its medial delivery (radio, cinema, etc), which forces continual consideration on acts of communication, social relations, and notions of identity. The current academic discourses on sound have developed through close dialogue with such sonic practices and media, which have been marked by a high degree of implicit theory.

This proximity of artistic and scholarly activity, combined with the shared focus on the instability of all attempted distinctions between sound as material for artistic construction and sound as conveyer of environmental information, also has shed new light on older layers of theory on sound and listening. This goes for the investigation of listening in the acousmatic situation (Pierre Schaeffer), for theory that accompanied the early stages of German electro-acoustic music (Werner Meyer-Eppler), not to mention the great 19th century tradition of acoustics and tone-perception (Hermann Helmholtz), and the extensive discussion of the significance of instrumental timbre in 19th century music theory and aesthetics.

We invite papers on all aspects of sound studies. But issues of particular interest are:

- The mediation of bodily presence and the role of the body in aural experience
- The voice and its mediations
- The interplay between sound and spatial experience
- The significance of instrumental timbre

Among many open questions to be dealt with are:

- How are the increasingly sophisticated techniques of sound recording, manipulation and transmission conditioning aural awareness of closeness and intimacy, while lending to the disruption and diffusion of such categories?
- Where might the aesthetical and thematic attributes of sound art aid in recognizing the features of what has been termed ‘the auditory turn’?
- How might sound and its inherent diversity inform extended interdisciplinary research?
- In what ways might dialogue onto the nature and behaviour of sound support understanding of the cultural and historical as mediated through listening?

Keynote Lecturers:

Sabine Breitsameter, Professor at the Faculty of Media of Hochschule Darmstadt, University of Applied Sciences

Christoph Cox, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College

Allen S. Weiss, Associate Adjunct Professor, Performance Studies and Cinema Studies, NYU