Visual & Inventive Practice
Week 5: Introduction to sound recording
Kat Jungnickel. 6, 29LG
[email protected]
Friday 28th Oct 2016
COURSE SUMMARY 1 - Introduction: Drawing Sociological Theory & Briefing about
Social Mobility
2 - Groupwork Pres & Lecture “Truth to Sociological Materials”
3 - Intro to Still Image Making (+ assignment briefing)
4 - Still Image Making – Assignment presentations
5 - Intro to Sound Recording (+ assignment briefing)
READING WEEK
COURSE SUMMARY 6 - Sound Recording - assignment presentations
7 - Intro to Using Video &Time Based Visual Media (+
assignment briefing)
8 - Video and Time Based Visual Media - assignment
presentations
9 - Student prep time for final week presentations
10 - Student Presentations (2-6pm)
Hierarchies of the senses
‘Seeing comes before words…and
establishes our place in the surrounding
world’ p.7
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books
‘In the hierarchy of the senses, the
epistemological status of hearing has come
a poor second to that of vision’ p.1
Michael Bull & Les Back (2003) ‘Introduc;on: Into Sound’ in Michael Bull & Les Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg Know the world differently
‘Yet the experience of everyday life is increasingly mediated
by a multitude of mechanically reproduced sounds’ p.1
‘The reduction of knowledge to the visual has placed serious
limitations on our ability to grasp the meanings attached to
much social behavior, be it contemporary, historical or
comparative’ p.2
‘knowing the world through sound is fundamentally different
from knowing the world through vision’ – Bruce Smith, p.129
Michael Bull & Les Back (2003) ‘Introduction: Into Sound’ in Michael Bull & Les
Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg
Broaden the senses
‘Democracy of the senses’ (Berendt 1985)
‘… means that no sense is privileged in relation to its
counterparts’
‘Thinking with our ears offers an opportunity to augment our
critical imagination, to comprehend our world and our
encounters with it according to multiple registers of feeling’
Michael Bull & Les Back (2003) ‘Introduction: Into Sound’ in Michael Bull & Les Back
(eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg
‘Deep listening’
‘The kind of listening we envision is not straightforward, not
self-evident – it is not easy listening. Rather, we have to work
towards what might be called agile listening and this involves
attuning our ears to listen again to the multiple layers of
meaning potentially embedded in the same sound. More than
this, deep listening involves practices of dialogue and
procedures for investigation, transposition and interpretation’
p.3
Translation
‘…. hint at a multitude of unexplored possibilities that
sociologists could use to analyse and represent the
world. They also indicate a future for sociology, where
the visual is not relegated to a sub discipline that has to
legitimate its use of imagery via recourse to some
mistaken ideas of objectivity, but by placing it as part
and parcel of a multitude of the available research
strategies of sociology itself’ (Guggenheim 2015:368)
What’s at stake?
-  ‘Sounds makes us re-think the meaning, nature and
significance of our social experience
-  Sound makes us re-think our relation to community
-  Sound makes us re-think our relational experiences, how
we relate to others, ourselves and the spaces and places
we inhabit
-  Sound makes us re-think our relationship to power’ p.3-4
-  ‘Sound makes us re-think our relationship to the other
senses and to embodiment itself’ (from 2016 version)
Examples
www.linkedm11.net/index2.html
Beheld – Graeme Miller
www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/beheld
Britt Hatzius – Blind Cinema
http://www.britthatzius.co.uk/blind_cinema.html
Janet Cardiff - The missing voice
www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/missing_voice.html
Janet Cardiff - The forty part motet
www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/motet.html
Susan Hiller - The last silent movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJtSkdf6IQ4
Gillian Wearing – 2 into 1
hCps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WUgFMDY-­‐M A sound recording mini-assignment:
You are asked to produce a sound piece/s (max 2mins). It
should relate to the sociological question you are exploring in
relation to social mobility and/or some aspect of CLASS
INEQUALITY from this reading :
Savage, Mike (1997) , Social Mobility, Individual Ability and the Inheritance of
Class Inequality, Sociology, 31(4): 645-672
Bring it along on an appropriate device to play. Prepare a short
(3-5 minutes) presentation
You should be starting to think about the develop your own
projects now. Please bring a research article that speaks to
your own interests. Also draw on this in your diary entry for this
week