The complex intersections of carceral violence and acoustics are particularly evident in the case of Saydnaya, the infamous military prison in Syria, known for its state-run torture practices under Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Often referred to as “the slaughterhouse”, the prison witnessed the hanging of as many as 13,000 individuals between 2011 and 2015. Survivor testimonies, along with the recent digital reconstruction of the prison’s interior, reveal that sound played a pivotal role in shaping the power dynamics within the Syrian prison system. Much of the violence inflicted in Saydnaya was acoustic in nature, intentionally designed around specific elements of the aural experience. The weaponization of sound in Saydnaya suggests that listening itself was manipulated as a mechanism of surveillance and torture, while paradoxically, it also became a means of resistance and survival.
The Syrian prison can be conceptualized as an acoustically surveilled site, marked by intentional sensory deprivation, weaponized silence, extreme listening practices, and acousmatic violence–violence whose sound lacks a visible source. Such practices were not isolated but part of a broader pattern of sonic warfare, which some critical sound theorists have increasingly highlighted in their exploration of the role of sound in incarceration.
This according to “Prisonniers du son: La prison de Saydnaya en Syrie” by Maria Ristani, Lieux de mémoire sonore: Des sons pour survivre, des sons pour tuer, ed. by Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Laëtitia Atlani-Duault (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2021, 21–35; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-107654).
A monster’s vocality and capacity for communication have been complicated themes since the earliest adaptations of the novel. The evolution of the monster’s speech, along with the dynamics of its silence, reveals how essential vocality is to forming a sympathetic portrayal of the character. Each new version highlights this relationship, demonstrating that even in adaptations where the monster’s voice is largely absent, vocality remains crucial to shaping audience empathy.
This dynamic mirrors what performance theorist Marvin Carlson describes as “ghosting”, a phenomenon where theater productions are infused with multiple layers of history. This creates interpretations linked to the audience’s memories of the written text, the performers, props, and even the performance space. In the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, these layers are even more complex and elusive, reflecting its extensive and varied influence over the two centuries since the novel’s publication.
Within this context, the monster is frequently depicted as dim-witted and inarticulate, if not entirely silent. Restoring the creature’s voice–along with the eloquence and insight it can convey–highlights an often-overlooked aspect of Shelley’s novel, particularly in relation to the pop culture narrative surrounding the “Frankenstein complex”, which influences how we interpret all Frankenstein texts, from film adaptations to staged dramas and the original novel. In this sense, the silencing of the monster significantly affects our capacity to empathize with them and shapes our understanding of their connection to our own humanity.
This according to “Listening to the monster: Eliding and restoring the creature’s voice in adaptations of Frankenstein” by Jude Wright (Journal of adaptation in film & performance 8/3 [2015] 249–266; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-90335).
The scene below from the 1931 film Frankenstein (directed by James Whale), illustrates how vocality can shape character empathy.
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DEUMM Online digitizes, enhances, and extends the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language. Comprising a broad range of entries (persons, topics, dances, genres, geographical locations, institutions, instruments, and works), DEUMM Online uses advanced and intuitive search and translation functionalities. This venerable music encyclopedia, which has set the standards in modern Italian music lexicography, is, in its new online format, once again an indispensable node in a comprehensive, international, networked research experience.
For those unable to join the Rome event in person, the event will be live streamed on YouTube by Fondazione Roma Tre Teatro Palladium, accessible directly from the following QR code:
The program (below) will include Daniele Trucco’s DEUMM-inspired music, greetings from Luca Aversano (President, ADUIM), Marcoemilio Camera (President, IAML Italia), and Tina Frühauf (Executive Director, RILM), as well as presentations by Zdravko Blažeković (Executive Editor, RILM), Stefano Campagnolo (Director, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma), Alex Braga (composer), and DEUMM Online’s general editors Antonio Baldassarre and Daniela Castaldo. Pianist Giuseppe Magagnino will also perform works by Ellington, Beethoven, The Beatles, and more.
And mark your calendars: DEUMM Online will be featured again at the following events:
19 November 2024: Turin, hosted by Istituto per i Beni Musicali di Piemonte at the Teatro Regio
21 November 2024: Milan, hosted by the Archivio Storico Ricordi in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense
Luigi Russolo’s contributions to art and music extend beyond his well-known manifesto, L’arte dei rumori (The art of noises). While he has been celebrated for his theoretical and practical advancements in noise music, his role as a painter and his impact on futurist art are equally significant. As one of the signatories of the futurist painting manifesto (1910), Russolo was deeply involved in the early development of futurism, an artistic and social movement that celebrated modernity, technology, and the dynamism of contemporary life. His painting Treno in velocità (Speeding train), a pivotal work that reflects the futurist fascination with speed and technological progress, exemplifies this enthusiasm for capturing movement and modern machinery.
House+Light+Sky (1913)
In his paintings from this period, Russolo explored the themes of motion, not just through the depiction of machines like trains and automobiles, but also by capturing the energy of crowds of protesters and other dynamic urban scenes. This exploration extended well beyond visual art into the realm of sound, culminating in his manifesto on noise, where he argued for a broader appreciation of the everyday sounds of industrial and urban life.
Synthèse plastique des mouvements d’une femme (Plastic synthesis of a woman’s movements, 1912)
Russolo’s invention of the intonarumori (noise instruments) was a direct extension of his artistic principles. These instruments were designed to produce a variety of noises, challenging conventional notions of musicality and embracing the sounds of the modern world. His compositions for these instruments anticipated future developments in experimental music and had a lasting influence on composers like George Antheil, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage. Russolo’s work represented an innovative fusion of visual art and sound, reflecting the futurist ideals of embracing the new and the dynamic. His influence extended into music and remains a testament to his innovative spirit in both the visual and auditory domains.
This according to “Pasajes sonoros [y ruidistas] de la ciudad futurista” by Juan Agustín Mancebo Roca (Ausart aldizkaria: Arte ikerkuntzarako aldizkaria/Journal for research in art/Revista para la investigación en arte 9/1 [2021] 127–142; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-16831). Also find the entry on Luigi Russolo in A dictionary of the avant-gardes (2001). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
The image at the beginning of this post is Russolo’s Dinamismo di un’ automobile (Dynamism of a car, 1913).
Below, the musician Mike Patton and Luciano Chessa test out reconstructed futurist noise machines based on intonarumori for an exhibit.
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As a central figure in the 1980’s Chicago noise rock scene with his band Big Black, the famed indie recording engineer/producer Steve Albini developed a reputation for his distinctly anti-commercial work ethic and ability to effectively convey gritty, abrasive noise. Albini’s stance was once described by the scholar and composer Marc Faris as constructing “a gender-, race-, and class-specific workingman persona”. Albini normally wore worker’s overalls (as in the photo above) while in the studio and described his approach to music recording in terms of construction or “putting together”, similar to a bricklayer or steelworker, touting a liveness to his sound by avoiding nonessential studio trickery. As part of the Chicago scene, Albini forged an aesthetic that mixed a musically exact virtuosity with a emphasis on communal music performance.
This aesthetic embraced a documentary approach to studio recording where record production honestly conveyed a band’s live performance with transparency and fidelity. Drums and guitar recording under Albini’s expertise were rendered with startling immediacy and liveness, allowing for the ostensibly natural sound of the performance and performing space to be aurally inscribed in the recording. This aspect of his craft was often described in terms of capturing the essence of a live band. Albini’s recording of vocals, however, often left them buried in the mix. He described his reasoning for focusing on instrumental elements of rock: “In the pop music tradition, the vocal is always the paramount thing . . . In records that are of a band . . . the vocals may not be the most important thing. Now, I can’t count the number of times that a vocalist has said, ʽOkay, it’s time to do the vocals on this. Give me a minute, I have to write some lyrics’”. With such reasoning, Albini placed a modernist aesthetic of instrumental performance squarely against the historically feminized, emotional pop aesthetic of vocal expression.
Albini (middle) and Big Black circa 1986.
One of Albini’s signature works as a recording engineer was on PJ Harvey’s critically acclaimed 1993 album Rid of me, which valorized a lo-fi aesthetic of raw musical expression, stripped down to its most fundamental elements. In the early 1990s, the emerging subgenre of lo-fi foregrounded debates about both the aesthetic and ideological significance of sound production in rock music. For some lo-fi artists and listeners, modes of performance, recording, and mediation were central to the meaning and expression of the recorded music. The ideologies and impulses of lo-fi were a crucial factor in shaping the contrasting implications of the production myths of Harvey’s recordings of that period, including Rid of me and 4-track demos.
PJ Harvey Rid of me cover art.
Harvey’s choice of Albini for the recording of Rid of me proved compelling. After all, Harvey’s musical persona had demonstrated a penchant for gendered antagonism and boundary-defying iconoclasm. She also shared similarities in sound and style with Albini’s noise rock aesthetic, namely abrasive guitars, drastic dynamic contrasts, rhythmic complexity, and an emphasis on tight-knit, active ensemble performance.
Read more in “The power of a production myth: PJ Harvey, Steve Albini, and gendered notions of recording fidelity” by Brian Jones (Popular music and society 42/3 (2019) 348–362. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-5609]
Steve Albini passed away in Chicago on 7 May 2024.
Below is studio footage featuring Albini and PJ Harvey during the Rid of me studio session in 1993 along with Big Black’s Racer-X.
“During my visit to Hồ Chí Minh City I heard a distinct sound, short and accented, coming from the small lanes in District 1. Listening, I tried to determine if there was an ostinato or sequence to the rhythms, but there wasn’t any. Fascinated by the sound, I ventured outside the guesthouse where I was staying to try to determine from where this sound was coming. I was unsuccessful in finding the source of the sound, so I made an enquiry with the guesthouse management. I was told it was a shaker type of instrument commonly heard at night, played by bicycle-riding masseurs offering their services.
Dining out on the following night, I heard another distinct sound that was accented with shorter sounds. That’s when I saw, for the first time, a type of shaker that belonged to one of the hundreds of people who commonly carry these instruments on their bicycles. Within minutes of this initial finding, I noted two more cyclists with their shakers.
After dinner, I approached one of them to ask as to what these were called. Unfortunately, he spoke almost no English and instead offered a massage. Upon returning to the guesthouse, I asked the management to write my question in Vietnamese. I was then able to communicate with another cyclist/masseur to establish the instrument’s name, function, and measurements. The effort was successful for his answer was a chuông gõ.
On my second trip to Hồ Chí Minh, I made a similar enquiry of several cyclists/masseurs to confirm the name of the instrument given to me on my first trip. Though this time the names of chuông gõ, cál lắc, and lắc lắp were given. I noted the variations in the construction of the instrument. The best-constructed ones of the lot were the chuông gõ, which seems to have been made with wire, pierced through the middle of bottle caps, and attached to a handle. Some handles were made of old garden trowels, while the most creative used an old squash racket grip. All variants combined recycled resources.”
Read more from Terry Moran in Vietnamese musical instruments: A monographic lexicon (2020). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
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Western classical music has been celebrated for its capacity to enlighten, to move, and as proponents of the Mozart effect suggest, improve listeners’ mental capacity. However, over the past 30 years in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, classical music has also come to function not just as art or entertainment but as a sonic weapon. It has been used as a means of dispelling and deterring so-called “loiterers” by making certain public and privately owned public spaces, including shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts, and car parks undesirable to occupy.
The origins of such practice began in 1985 when a branch manager of a 7-Eleven convenience store in British Colombia, Canada began broadcasting classical and easy listening music into the store’s parking lot to prevent local teenagers from congregating. Since then, classical music has been used as a deterrent on public transport systems in Portland, Oregon, in library foyers to deter smokers and loiterers in Canada, and in train stations of northeast England, where the broadcasting of music by the composer Frederick Delius targeted what was described as “low level antisocial behavior”.
Ted Crow/Washington Post
In such cases, the weaponization of Western music can be recognized as an audio-affective technology of what Neil Smith (1996,1998) called “the revanchist city”, resonating with the spatial logics of urban revanchism–drawing comparisons with the mixture of militarism and moralism that characterized the bourgeois, reactionary revanchists of late-19th century Paris. In this context, it becomes a means to affectively police the boundaries of public space, guarding against unwanted and threatening populations. There is also, however, an apparent tension in the audio-affective functioning of Western classical music as a deterrent. Although classical music is thought to improve the undesirable behavior attributed to loitering because of its capacity to soothe and calm, it also drives away and inhibits loiterers by generating negative affections (i.e., sensations of irritation, alienation, and annoyance). While affect has been posited as a site of freedom by comparison to the predictability of social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies how musical affect can reproduce social stratification.
Learn more in “To soothe or remove? Affect, revanchism, and the weaponized use of classical music” by Marie Thompson (Communication and the public II/4 [December 2017], 272–283). Find this journal in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
Listen to Frederick Delius’ On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring below.
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The Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier’s (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) work on the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, France (pictured below) has been touted as iconic of the international style. Built between 1950 and 1955, the chapel has a tower reminiscent of a grain silo, a sweeping roof that resembles a floppy hat and curved walls with rectangular apertures of various shapes and sizes. These characteristics all reflect Le Corbusier’s taste for articulated light and reinforced concrete, as well as his distinct penchant for sparse and ascetic design. Due to one wall of the chapel being set several feet inside the edge of the roof, it is possible to be both under the roof and open to the elements. Le Corbusier used the east wall of the chapel as a cyclorama against which the public and private altars were set, incorporating a swiveling statue of the Virgin Mary to accommodate both. The building’s architecture also reminds of Le Corbusier’s past as a Cubist painter and that he continued to produce two-dimensional visual art throughout his career.
Le Corbusier also is well-known for his work on Edgard Varése’s Poéme électronique for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The work was performed in an elaborate installation of sound routes which circled the performance space in a building designed by Iannis Xenakis. Le Corbusier designed a spectacle of colored lights and images to accompany Varèse’s piece, which was a self-sufficient musical work, part of a larger composition of architecture, sound, light, and image. Unpublished correspondence between Varèse and Le Corbusier suggests that they originally intended to conceptually coordinate sound and image. At the very least, Le Corbusier’s script influenced the form and sound material of Varèse’s piece.
Learn more in the entry on Le Corbusier in A dictionary of the avant-gardes (2001). Find it in RILM Music Encylopedias.
Below is a performance of Varése’s Poéme électronique by the Tufts University Electronic Music Ensemble, followed by a video featuring a walk-through of Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp.
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AI voice, as a groundbreaking phenomenon, highlights two possible meanings that are often not problematized: the voice embedded into AI-based devices and the voice created using AI algorithms. To clarify the distinctions and the intersections of these two meanings, approaches inspired by media archaeology and social constructionism may be used to explore a social phenomenon constructed by the interaction of a discursive level of representation and a non-discursive level of material practice and operation.
The interaction of these two levels results in a tension between anthropocentrism and posthumanism–a characteristic of AI voice. Two case studies represent this tension, namely the commercial of the smart speaker Amazon Alexa and the phenomenon of voice cloning. While the first example demonstrates how at a discursive level the “voice in the machine” is represented to personify AI technology, the second, which consists in the possibility of reproducing the features of an embodied and personal voice, provides an example of how the materialization of that cultural idea depends on the technical possibilities and material practices required by data-driven algorithms.
Read on in “AI voice between anthropocentrism and posthumanism: Alexa and voice cloning” by Domenico Napolitano (Journal of interdisciplinary voice studies VII/1 [August 2022], 35-49).
Below is a video that jokingly explores the voice behind the Amazon Alexa.
Daniela Cascella’s 2017 book Singed: Muted voice-transmissions after the fire contemplates the silences and fissures that take disconnected works and tune them into a shared frequency. The book inspires a reading and listening that opens rather than closes the depths of a given work of art. In Soused (2014), the collaborative record between the eminently obscure singer-songwriter Scott Walker and the minimalist sub-bass drone group Sunn O))), the same types of disconnect and shared frequencies elicited in Cascella’s Singed are brought together.
Given the extremity of both Walker and Sunn O))), the meeting point of these extremes leaves listeners to wonder, as Cascella might, how one is able to write or speak after listening to Soused? This evocation is based on the way that both Walker and Sunn O))) push their listeners to various limits, be it lyrically, vocally, aesthetically, or sonically. Walker’s excess is a coalescence of all these things–his lyrics operate through what he calls “edge work”; his voice matures toward a depersonalized space voided of the usual predicates so that it resembles the sound “of just a man singing”. Walker’s aesthetic becomes increasingly dark with each of his albums, punctuated by long periods of reclusiveness and silence. The musical soundscapes, from the album Climate of hunter (1984) onward, become increasingly expansive, more experimental, and ultimately more difficult. Similar to Walker, excess and minimalism characterize Sunn O)))’s primal slabs of guitar and synth. Their maximalist drone doom collapses the boundaries between the aural and haptic, carving out an immersive physio-aural-haptic experience. The idea of an “apocalyptic tone” (inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s notion of disaster) becomes the basis of these imagined frequencies and resonates in the soundworld created by Walker and Sunn O))) on Soused.
Read on in “The apocalyptic tone of Scott Walker, Sunn O))) and Soused” by Adam Potts (Journal for cultural research XXIV/3 [2020], 185–202).
Below is the music video for Brando, from the album Soused, by Gisèle Vienne.
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The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
