Power, Politics and Performance

During this session I generated keywords and potential questions to be used for my audio concept.

From the early stages I noted, broadly, that I wanted my audio paper to have a deliberate musical undercurrent that intertwines with the research and general atmosphere. Namely, this would involve soundtracking the audio paper with something unintrusive enough that it doesn’t distract from the information but enough to lend a faint musical tone throughout – rather than scattered fragments of field recordings, for example. Principally, this ‘tone’ should unify the sonic aspects of my paper to the informational intent it holds.

I also considered where I was to situate myself in the recording – my initial instinct was to remove all sense of self from the audio – that my voice should simply act as a conveyor of information without inflicting the work with a sense of ‘personality’ and that I shouldn’t aim to tailor my recording environment to an aesthetic purpose. As though doing so would, perhaps, de-value the audio paper as inauthentic.

However, upon re-reading Felds quote – “I am always present in the recording…Even if that presence is not audibly legible to the listener” this led me to re-evaluate my position of impartiality towards my sense of self. Simply, I began to consider that in the act of recording my own voice (let alone the conscious act of creating a recording) it is immensely or impossible difficult to divorce a sense of personality from it. Therefore, I decided in the same way I was deliberately curating a soundtrack element to the piece, the conscious injection of my character into the work was also a freeing creative tool that could certainly supplement the information given- as opposed to an atonal, robotic narrator.

The keywords and questions I generated focused on ‘memory’ and ‘nostalgia’. At this stage, simply the concept of “What does memory sound like?” is my root idea to be developed. For this, I would like to explore ideas of hauntology , and how ambient music can draw on ideas of memory to create its own worlds.

Also during the session, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work deeply interested me.

Hamdan’s use of sound as a very practical means of investigation into issues of human rights violations and state crimes proved to be immensely inspiring. Using the unique attributes of sound (always leaking, often uncontrollable) as a tangible source of evidence and political action is a practice entirely new to me.

Sound and music has, and always will be, intersecting with politics and power. So it is therefore that, to me, the idea of sound being used in such a overtly practical way , almost entirely removed from pure aesthetic purpose, was especially intriguing and powerful.