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598: Sound and Aurality: The ‘Deafspot’ of Internet Studies?: A conversation at the interstices of sound studies and critical internet studies
Time:
Friday, 20/Oct/2023:
1:30pm - 3:00pm
Location:Whistler B
Sonesta Hotel
Presentations
Sound and Aurality: The ‘Deafspot’ of Internet Studies?: A conversation at the interstices of sound studies and critical internet studies
Andrew Herman1, Andrew Bottomley2, Holly Kruse3, Aram Sinnreich4, Anne MacLennan5
1Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; 2State University of New York-Oneata, USA; 3Rogers State University, USA; 4American University, USA; 5York University, Canada
This roundtable will seek to foster cross-disciplinary conversation about possible lines of inquiry that might emerge at the intersection of critical internet studies and sound studies. AoIR has long been established as the primary scholarly organization devoted to critical analysis of the Internet, yet a cursory examination of past conference programs reveals relatively scant attention to the role of sound and aurality within the cultural imaginaries or socio-technical materialities of the internet. Accordingly, this roundtable will explore how sound studies suggest ways in which the relative ‘deafness’ of critical internet studies can be literally “remediated”. Within sound studies, there are two broad approaches to the study of sound and aurality: the first draws upon a sociologically oriented cultural studies tradition and foregrounds the phenomenology of sound, music, noise, and silence as they have been instantiated in discrete social practices (cf. Sterne, 2012); the second is an STS approach that focuses on “technologies for storing, manipulating, and transferring sound and music . . . and new ways of measuring, conceptualizing, and controlling sound.” (Pinch and Bjisterveld, 2012: 5; Grimshaw-Aagaard, 2019: 17). Drawing upon their current research projects, the roundtable participants will engage these approaches with an ear towards articulating them with critical internet studies. Andrew Bottomley will reflect upon the failures of audio-based social media platforms/tools including Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces; Andrew Herman will explore the ambivalent instantiation of listening publics in the internet radio assemblage and the possibilities of using aural methodologies of media archaeological resonance; Holly Kruse will consider the cultural valences of "liveness" on music video platforms such as YouTube; Anne MacLennan will reflect upon understandings of sonic “authenticity” that animate podcasting in comparison with early radio broadcasting; and Aram Sinnreich will discuss the liberatory capacity of AI-generated music that drives an ontological wedge between music-as-commodity and musicking-as-social-praxis.
