Bulletin of Latin American ResearchVolume 42, Issue 1 p. 167-168 Book Review Chaves, Rui and Lazzetta, Fernando (2019) Making it Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art, Bloomsbury (New York), xix + 274 pp, £137 hbk. Tim Shaw, Corresponding Author Tim Shaw [email protected] Newcastle University, UKSearch for more papers by this author Tim Shaw, Corresponding Author Tim Shaw [email protected] Newcastle University, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.13446Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume42, Issue1Special Section: The Cultural Politics of Reproduction in Latin AmericaJanuary 2023Pages 167-168 RelatedInformation

This article builds on Richards’s work to formulate an understanding of the emerging practice of performance-installation, which embraces sound art, DIY electronic music and maker culture. A number of key points are addressed in this formulation: making/unmaking and ‘public making’; the assembling/disassembling of sonic devices and artefacts in the performance space; sound ‘through’ materials and materials at hand; and site and architectural features as material. In addition, readymade actions, illustrated by George Brecht’s The Cabinet , and the relationship between audience and performer are also presented. The article continues by outlining practice undertaken by the authors comprising two UK tours: ‘Sacrificial Floors’, 2018 with Tetsuya Umeda; and ‘Points of Failure’, 2020. Derek Bailey’s idea of ‘instrumental impulse’ is extended to include the concepts of expanded and reduced instruments that encompass ‘instrument as object’ and ‘raw material as instrument’. ‘Instrument’ is also viewed as a distributed mesh-like structure in which collective improvisation may occur. Borrowing from Ingold, ‘wayfaring’ is used to describe improvising with materials found ‘along the way’. Silent actions, uncontrollable instruments, unstable systems, performative failures, reimagined affordance of objects, ‘playing with resource’ and ‘improvising inside electronics’ are all addressed in relation to performance-installation. Finally, the authors explore the idea of ‘virtuosity in listening’, and question sonic autonomy and self-expression in improvisation and how ‘attending to sound’ can be an active part of improvised performance.

Jacek Smolicki and Tim Shaw Soundwalking is the practice of walking through a space while prioritizing listening. Evolved through the research of the World Soundscape Project, early soundwalking experiments studied the transformation of soundscapes in Vancouver in the late 1960s.1 The group consisted of scholars, composers and artists united by an interest in sound and environment. As Hildegard Westerkamp described:

Interactive media and technology has the potential to make intangible, hidden, and ‘lost’ aspects of heritage sites engaging and present for visitors. The design of such media and technology should also consider communities as producers of their heritage sites, yet communities may be unfamiliar with the creative and technological possibilities. We describe ongoing creative work with a community group seeking to increase cultural and social use of the medieval Church of St Andrew, and the artworks that enabled us to collectively explore how interactive media and technology could bring the site’s heritage to life. We discuss the value of this multiple making as a productive means for exploring situated and embodied experiences of intangible cultural heritage.

Empirical sociological and critical-reflective accounts of technology in action show how the design, development and use of interactive systems involves complex, changing configurations between participants, materials and the objects of design. Such observations make many rationalistic and normative accounts of design highly problematic (e.g. that design is essentially problem solving). Our work goes beyond such critical points and investigates practical strategies for managing complex projects that do justice to the entangled character of practice whilst enabling a high level of creative productivity. We report on a long-term collaboration between micro-businesses, artists, researchers, their institutions and their publics to create media, installations, performances, and participatory workshops. We document the range of design work that we were able to achieve and discuss a number of the challenges we encountered. We conclude by critically discussing several orientations to design research against our emerging image of design as "many makings".

Culture Lab, University of Newcastle; and Centre for Digital Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

This paper describes a long term, collaborative project Sound Spaces. Within this project we creatively investigated various environments and built a collection of artworks in response to material gathered through a number of practical field visits. Our responses were presented in numerous, idiosyncratic ways and took shape through a number of concerted making activities. The work was conducted both in and with the public, allowing participants to inform the creative decisions made throughout the project as well as experiencing the building of the artworks. Within this essay we report on our process, presentation and offer alternative methods for collecting material and presenting representations of space using Ambisonic and other technologies. We describe the many responses made during our time and related these to research concerns relevant to the NIME community. We conclude with our findings and, through the production of an annotated portfolio, offer our main emerging themes as points of discussion.

From the early experimentation with specific sounds in musique concrète (Palombini 1999) to the ‘anecdotal’ music of Luc Ferrari (1996) and the ecological sound activism of Hildegard Westerkamp (2002), the collecting, composition and recomposition of sonorous objects has been central to sound practice. Some sound art has privileged a relationship with visual arts and the structuring of objects in curated spaces (Licht 2007), others with the sound worlds beyond the exhibition (Schafer 1994). By examining a specific sound art installation,Sound and Seclusionby Tim Shaw, this article reworks the idea of sonorous objects as artefacts displaying different kinds of representations, knowledges or data. This question of sonorous ‘knowledge-objects’ is particularly important as ‘collected sounds’ become incorporated into compositions away from their, often remote, spatio-temporal origin out there in the landscape. This article raises three areas for discussion. First, what can sonorous objects tell us about the pre-compositional world (Impett 2007)? Second, in what ways can we understand sonorous objects as they are reworked in compositions which re-narrate them? Third, how can we understand sonorous objects as traces and pieces of data as well as aesthetic productions? The article concludes with a case for reworking the very idea of a sonorous object in sound practices as a product of dead logics and dead worlds as it emerges in new ensembles of composition away from its origin.

In this paper we present Fields, a sound diffusion performance implemented with web technologies that run on the mobile devices of audience members. Both a technical system and bespoke composition, Fields allows for a range of sonic diffusions to occur, and therefore has the potential to open up new paradigms for spatialised music and media performances. The project introduces how handheld technology used as a collective array of speakers controlled live by a centralized performer can create alternative types of participation within musical performance. Fields not only offers a new technological approach to sound diffusion, it also provides an alternative way for audiences to participate in live events, and opens up unique forms of engagement within sonic media contexts.

In this paper we describe an artistic response to a collection of natural history museum artefacts, developed as part of a residency with an arts organisation. Drawing on a critical literature in studies of material culture, the work incorporated data sonification, image audification, field recordings and created a number of instruments for exploring geological artefacts and meterological data as aesthetic material. The residency culminated in an exhibition presented as a ‘sensorium’ for the sensory exploration of museum objects. In describing the methods and thinking behind the project this paper presents an alternative approach to engaging artists and audiences with local heritage and museum archives, which draws on research in NIME and allied literatures, and which is devoted to enlivening collections as occasions for varied interpretation, appropriation and aesthetic response.