Tag Archives: Sound

The marriage of sounds and music in the Arab world: An annotated bibliography

The library of the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) in Paris is home to an extensive collection of writings on music from the Arab world, a region stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Indian Ocean. This series of blog posts highlights selections from this collection, along with abstracts written by RILM staff members contained in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, the comprehensive bibliography of writings about music and music-related subjects. In 2026, the Institut du Monde Arabe will host an exhibition on wedding cultures in the Arab world, and the institute’s library will hold an on-site exhibition of its book collection covering this topic.

In the Arab world, weddings unfold through a series of ceremonies where daily preparations and references to the sacred intertwine to initiate and bless the union of two families. From the first promises of the engagement ceremony to the morning after the wedding night, each step is guided by social norms and enveloped in society’s ideals of generosity, community, and gender roles. Whether it takes place in a single day or over the traditional seven days, each step of the wedding is intentionally marked by specific melodies, rhythms, and sounds. Prior to the actual wedding ceremony, during the night of ḥinnaẗ, natural dye is applied to the bride’s hands and feet as women praise the her beauty and recount love’s woes in song. Then, joyous zaġārīd (trills) through the air to declare the news to all, near and far, as the cantillation of the Qur’an or other sacred prayers proclaims the couple’s union in front of God. As upbeat drums of the zaffaẗ announce and accompany the procession of the newlyweds, a subtler percussion chimes from the ẖilẖāl, the bride’s anklet, gifted from the groom to the bride to honor her femininity. These sounds intertwine with the most refined cultural expressions–skillfully crafted jewelry, intricately embroidered adornments, fragrances, and the finest cuisine, all blended  together in celebration.

Le mariage by Tunisian painter Ahmed Hajeri. Source: Altaïr portal of the Institut du Monde Arabe. Copyright: Musée de l’Institut du monde arabe/Philippe Maillard.

Even as the rush of modern life permeates every aspect of society in the Arab world, weddings continue to preserve many of the age-old customs. The related ceremonies create a momentary pause in the relentless flow of life to mark new social bonds and a transformation from singularity to family. The writings and research related to this lifecycle event covered in the annotated bibliography below explore the enduring customs across various regions of the Arab world: from the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara Desert and the Nubian tribes of the Nile Valley to urban dwellers in Cairo and Mosul. They document lyrics, transcribe melodies, describe instruments, and detail the roles of men and women in musical performances–all in an ongoing effort to understand and preserve this rich heritage of wedding customs and music.

Annotated bibliography

ʿAlī, Muḥammad Šiḥātaẗ. أغاني النساء في صعيد مصر: الأعراس، البكائيات، التحنين [Women’s songs in Upper Egypt: Wedding, lament, and pilgrimage songs] (al-Qāhiraẗ: al-Hayʾaẗ al-Miṣriyyaẗ al-ʿĀmmaẗ li-l-Kitāb, 2015). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-92222; IMA catalogue reference]. 

Transcribing orally transmitted songs in Upper Egypt is crucial, especially as many of them are at risk of being forgotten due to the passing of older women who have memorized them. Song texts were collected as the result of ethnographic research in villages in the al-Badārī province of the Asyut governorate. The three main categories of the transcribed repertoire are songs related to rites of passage, such as weddings and their associated ceremonies, funeral and lament songs known as bukāʾiyyāt, and songs known as taḥnīn, performed in preparation for the pilgrimage. An appendix with photos capturing women’s activities in various aspects of life, including domestic chores, agricultural work, food preparation, and market activities is included.

ʿArnīṭaẗ, Yusrá Ǧawhariyyaẗ. الفنون الشعبية في فلسطين [Popular arts in Palestine] (Rāmallāh: Dār al-Šurūq li-l-Našr wa-al-Tawzīʿ, 2013). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-54151; IMA catalogue reference]

The tangible and intangible forms of folklore–encompassing popular musical expressions, embroidery customs, and ceremonial practices associated with marriage and celebrations–serve as testimony to the enduring heritage and cultural continuity of the Palestinian people. The present effort to document select aspects of Palestinian folklore serves several purposes: first, to safeguard these manifestations of popular culture and ensure their continuity; second, to forge a robust connection between the present and history; third, to uncover the creative dimensions inherent in Palestinian folklore; and ultimately, to inspire fellow researchers in music and the arts to undertake similar endeavors in documenting Palestinian folklore. Folk songs should be approached with the same urgency to study and preserve such as other Palestinian traditions. Popular songs’ characteristics are detailed, including the characteristics of colloquial dialects, the melodic content, maqam structure, ornaments, and more. Transcriptions of the melodies of 66 songs, along with their transcribed lyrics, are included and are chosen as hailing from different cities. The songs are grouped by topic or occasion, as follows: children’s songs and lullabies, songs of religious holidays and celebrations; love and wedding songs; songs of war and encouragement; work songs; drinking, satirical, and political songs; dance songs; funeral chants and laments; songs of stories and tales. Popular song is a reflection of the Palestinian peoples’ ways of life and social customs and is a spontaneous expression of collective feelings and aspirations. 

al-ʿĀṣimī, Ğamīlaẗ. أغاني نساء مراكش: اللعابات، الطقيطقات، الهواري، التهضيرة [Women’s songs in Marrākuš: The laʿābāt, the ṭaqīṭaqāt, the hawārī, and the tahḍīraẗ] (Marrākuš: Muʾassassaẗ Āfāq li-l-Dirāsāt wa-al-Našr wa-al-Ittiṣāl, 2012). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2012-50441; IMA catalogue reference].  

Women’s songs in Marrākuš are transmitted orally from one woman to another, they are unauthored and composed collectively. Based on fieldwork with professional women performers, song forms and texts are transcribed alongside documentation on the accompanying percussion instruments and the names of the women’s groups performing each piece. Twenty-four song texts from the laʿābāt, a women’s ensemble that performs during weddings and related ceremonies, are included. Additionally, 20 song texts of the ṭaqīṭaqāt, a song form that is also performed by the laʿābāt groups on festive occasions and features articulate lyrics and steady rhythms, are transcribed. Twenty-nine song texts from two types of the hawārī song form are included, and 11 song texts of the tahḍīraẗ form, performed by groups of women during weddings, promenades, or private gatherings, are presented. An appendix contains 12 transcriptions of short excerpts from songs and the notation for each percussion section of the two hawārī song forms.

al-Asyūṭī, Darwīš. أفراح الصعيد الشعبية: من طقوس ونصوص احتفاليات الزواج والحمل والولادة والختان [The weddings of Upper Egypt: Rituals, texts, and ceremonies of marriage, pregnancy, and circumcision] (al-Qāhiraẗ: al-Hayʾaẗ al-Miṣriyyaẗ al-ʿĀmmaẗ li-l-Kitāb, 2012). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2012-52032; IMA catalogue reference].

Describes the rituals and customs associated with engagement and marriage preparation in Asyut, Upper Egypt. It covers various traditions, including the dowry presentation, the shopping process for establishing a new bridal household, the ḥinnaẗ night for the bride, and the ritual shower for the groom, among other related ceremonies. It also includes transcriptions of song lyrics collected from narrators in Asyut, as well as others memorized by the author.

Bayrūk, ʿAzzaẗ. الغناء الحساني بين التنظيم والتلقائية [Hassanian singing between structure and spontaneity] (al-Rabāṭ: Markaz al-Dirāsāt al-Ṣaḥrāwiyyaẗ/Centre des Études Sahariennes, 2015). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-92229; IMA catalogue reference].

The singing of the Ḥassānī tribes can be categorized into two branches: structured singing, also known as the hūl, which has been shaped by the influences of Arab, African, and Berber traditions and developed during the Ḥassānī rule in the Western Sahara during the 15th and 16th centuries; and a second branch that is unstructured and spontaneous, encompassing prophetic praise, wedding songs, rain songs, work songs, and lullabies, among others. The analysis includes a selection of song texts and their social contexts.

al-Daywahǧī, Saʿīd. تقاليد الزواج في الموصل [Marriage traditions in Mosul] (al-Mawṣil: Muʾassasaẗ Dār al-Kutub, 1975). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1975-28979; IMA catalogue reference]. 

Explores the social customs associated with marriage in Mosul, from the etiquette of selecting a bride or groom to the week-long wedding celebrations and the social norms governing interactions between the families of the bride and groom. Transcriptions of the lyrics of 32 wedding songs are included. Thematically, these songs celebrate the bride and groom, describe their virtues and beauty, express the families’ emotions as they bid farewell to their daughters and sons, and highlight societal expectations of marriage, among other topics.

El Mallah, Issam. The role of women in Omani musical life/Die Rolle der Frau im Musikleben Omans (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1997). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1997-11646; IMA catalogue reference].

The role of women in the transmission and preservation of Omani traditional music is significant, as is their influence. Women take on roles as singers, drummers, dancers, instrumentalists, and leaders in organizing dance and singing groups. The participation of women in musical arts can be grouped into two categories: arts exclusively practiced by women and those practiced alongside men. The ones involving men and women include collective dance, collective drumming, and work songs. The art forms exclusively practiced by women include women’s drumming circles, women’s work songs, Bedouin dances, wedding songs and dances, traditional healing ceremonies, and arts involving young girls. A description of the setting and context of each art form is included.

Ibn Ḥarbān, Ǧāsim Muḥammad. الزواج في المجتمع البحريني عاداته، تقاليده، فنونه [Marriage in Bahraini society: Customs, traditions, and arts] (Bayrūt: al-Muʾassasaẗ al-ʿArabiyyaẗ li-l-Dirāsāt wa-al-Našr, 2000). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2000-84970; IMA catalogue reference].  

Weddings in Bahrain involve a wealth of cultural expressions. The process of marriage includes various customs such as dowry arrangements and the elaborate preparation of both the groom and the bride. There are specific dress codes for men and women, along with jewelry, embellishments, and perfumes designated for each. The food prepared for weddings is also central to the ceremony. Women musician ensembles known as the ʿiddaẗ typically perform at these events. The song forms and accompanying dances, including the dizzaẗ and the zaffaẗ, are described, along with the rhythms and percussion instruments used. Related arts and customs are also discussed, such as the practice of naḍir–a ritual where individuals offer physical or symbolic gifts in hopes of fulfilling a wish or prayer; the ʿāšūrī which involves women performing drums and dance ceremonies; the ẖammārī, a women’s dance where participants are covered with a body cloth; and the naǧdī mawwāl, a song form sung by women, among other events. Transcriptions of some song texts and rhythms are included.

Mahfoufi, Mehenna. Chants de femmes en Kabylie: Fêtes et rites au village–Étude d’ethnomusicologie [Women’s songs in Minṭaqaẗ al-Qabāʾil: Celebrations and rites in the village–An ethnomusicological study]. (Paris: Ibis Press, 2005). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2005-16247; IMA catalogue reference].

A study of village song in Minṭaqaẗ al-Qabāʾil, focusing on the songs of women that accompany various festivals and the rhythm of daily life: birth, marriage, the expression of love, lullabies, bouncing (a game that consists of bouncing babies on one’s lap), death, and religious song. The songs are transcribed and translated, and their musical form is described and analyzed. The accompanying CD features wedding songs in tracks 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. 

Mécheri-Saada, Nadia. Musique touarègue de l’Ahaggar (sud algérien) [Tuareg music of the Ahaggar in southern Algeria] (Paris: Awal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1995-9971; IMA catalogue reference].

The Ahaggar in southern Algeria is the homeland of Tuareg culture. Tuareg music is linked to the context of its performance, notably village festivals. Principal Tuareg instruments include the imzad (one-string fiddle), the tazamar (end-blown flute), and drums. Five musical genres are differentiated, including women’s marriage songs (āléwen) and the chanted poetry accompanied by drums, the tindé. The music’s texts, their themes, their social significance, and their poetics are analyzed.

Kamāl, Ṣafwat. “أفراح النوبة” [The weddings of the Nubia], al-Funūn al-šaʿbiyyaẗ 100 (yanāyir-dīsambir, 2015) 5175. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-92886; IMA catalog reference].

In Nubia, marriage involves customs and rituals ranging from the engagement period to the ḥinnaẗ night in preparation for the wedding, the offering of a dowry, a feast on the wedding day, and the exchange of gifts, among others. The celebrations typically last for seven days. Transcriptions of selected songs that accompany these rituals were collected before the displacement of the Nubian peoples following the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s and thus highlight traditional Nubian social values and religious beliefs.

Puig, Nicolas. Farah: Musiciens de noces et scènes urbaines au Caire (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2010-54197; IMA catalogue reference].  

Faraḥ, which literally means joy or happiness, refers to the wedding ceremonies and street festivities in Egypt. Vibrant wedding nights, featuring musical ensembles, dancers, and many forms of socialization reflect social class and status. Musicians’ and singers’ negotiation of social norms and perceptions is approached as social performance. A proper understanding of marriage festivities in urban spaces is situated within the evolving attitudes towards public urban areas in Cairo, and in relation to other local festivities such as festivals and the celebration of saints’ mawlid. Since the mid-19th century, the modernizing reforms of public urban spaces have significantly influenced the venues for public music-making in Cairo, leading to changes in musical forms, the introduction of new instruments, and the adoption of new technologies. These changes have, in turn, affected the form and delivery of music during street weddings. A closer examination of the lives and work of four wedding musicians illustrates the numerous economic and social factors that shape their careers, their aspirations, and the challenges they encounter as wedding musicians in Cairo.

Written and compiled by Farah Zahra, Associate Editor, RILM

Related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2024/09/07/writing-on-music-in-abbasid-baghdad-an-annotated-bibliography/

https://bibliolore.org/2024/07/12/palestine-in-song-an-annotated-bibliography/

https://bibliolore.org/2023/04/12/singing-the-revolution-in-the-arab-world-an-annotated-bibliography/

Leave a Comment

Filed under Africa, Asia, Dance, Gender and sexuality, Instruments, Politics, Popular music, Religious music, Sound, Women's studies, World music

Electroacoustic sound, multimedia, and digital opera

Digital opera has roots in electroacoustic works that integrate spatial soundscapes into performance, such as Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000, pictured above). Musicologist Anna Schürmer offers a broader view, tracing its history even further, suggesting its origins may precede electroacoustic sound. Schürmer links the evolution of digitally mediated works to the construction of larger 18th century theaters, where sound connected audiences across physical divides. Earlier multimedia-infused productions, like Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die soldaten (1965), Harrison Birtwistle’s The mask of Orpheus (1986), Libby Larsen’s Frankenstein (1990), and Bill Viola’s The Tristan project (2004, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic), are significant for their use of electronics. However, they fall short of utilizing digital sound sample processing. Additional antecedents include mid-20th century radio plays and performances where multimedia significantly shaped the auditory experience.

A production of Viola’s The Tristan project.

From Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine.

The most prominent use of contemporary digital technology in opera lies in sound design, where digital processing techniques shape how audiences perceive sound within the performance space. This innovation builds on earlier milestones, including IRCAM (the French institute of research on music and sound) performances employing electronic or MIDI keyboards and voice, such as Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine (1987) and various works by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 21st century, the digital manipulation of sound samples has become a staple–though often overlooked–in both contemporary and traditional operatic productions, with subtle amplification techniques further extending its reach.

This according to the new entry on digital opera by Megan Steigerwald Ille, in DEUMM Online.

Below is a performance of Die soldaten with music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, along with an excerpt from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin sung by the soprano, Susanna Phillips.

Read related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2024/03/19/kaija-saariahos-avant-garde-sound-worlds/

https://bibliolore.org/2014/04/05/spohr-and-german-opera/

https://bibliolore.org/2011/07/10/italian-opera-manuals/

Comments Off on Electroacoustic sound, multimedia, and digital opera

Filed under Opera, Sound, Space, Uncategorized

Vocality and the Frankenstein complex

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.

Comments Off on Vocality and the Frankenstein complex

Filed under Curiosities, Dramatic arts, Literature, Reception, Sound, Voice

Cyclist/masseurs and their shakers in urban Vietnam

Hồ Chí Minh City, December 2003

“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.

Comments Off on Cyclist/masseurs and their shakers in urban Vietnam

Filed under Asia, Instruments, Sound

Western classical music as sonic weapon

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.

Comments Off on Western classical music as sonic weapon

Filed under Politics, Sound, Space

Le Corbusier, architecture, and sound

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.

Comments Off on Le Corbusier, architecture, and sound

Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Architecture, Europe, Performers, Sound

Lettrism’s language art

Initiated by Isidore Isou (born Jean-Isidore Goldstein), a young refugee from Romania, lettrism was a multidisciplinary creative movement that began in Paris in 1946 but soon expanded by attracting numerous creative people. Lettrist work was inspired by calligraphy, initially for books but also for visual art. In the age of print, it was quite innovative, although it may not have fared as well in preprint times. One recurring device is letters that resemble verses, even though they are devoid of words. Prominent writers and artists based in France such as Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J. Wolman, Maurice Lemaître, Roberto Altmann, Roland Sabatier, and Jean-Paul Curtay were among those associated with the group at various times.

The movement was named Lettrism because historically it was first and foremost interested in rethinking poetry, which at the time was judged to be exhausted when conveyed simply through words and concepts. Poetic lettrism clearly and systematically for the first time (taking inspiration from Dada) proposed a new conception of poetry entirely reduced to letters and eliminating all semantics. Not unlike other self-conscious agglomerations, lettrism was particularly skilled at producing manifestos which can be read with varying degrees of sense. By discounting semantic and syntactical coherence for language art, some lettrist works are considered the precursors of concrete poetry. Among the alumni are Guy Debord (1931–94), who is commonly credited with initiating the Situationist International (1958–72), which, according to some, represents art’s most profound, courageous, and successful involvement in radical politics. While Situationist writings have been translated into English, lettrist texts largely have been left out.

Find out more about lettrism in A dictionary of the avant-gardes. Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME).

The first image above was created by Roberto Altmann, and the second by Maurice Lemaître–both were artists associated with the lettrist movement.

Below is a video of Orson Welles interviewing Isidore Isou about lettrism and sound poetry in 1955. Be sure to turn up your volume when watching it.

Comments Off on Lettrism’s language art

Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Literature, Sound, Visual art

Sonic control devices

 

For almost 60 years, media technologies have promised users the ability to create sonic safe spaces for themselves—from bedside white noise machines to Beats by Dre’s Hear what you want ad campaign, in which Colin Kaepernick’s headphones protect him from taunting crowds.

Noise-canceling headphones, tinnitus maskers, LPs that play ocean sounds, nature-sound mobile apps, and in-ear smart technologies illuminate how the true purpose of media is not information transmission, but rather the control of how we engage our environment. These devices give users the freedom to remain unaffected in the changeable and distracting spaces of contemporary capitalism, revealing how racial, gendered, ableist, and class ideologies shape our desire to block unwanted sounds.

In a noisy world of haters, trolls, and information overload, guarded listening can be a necessity for self-care, but our efforts to shield ourselves can also decrease our tolerance for sonic and social difference.

This according to Hush: Media and sonic self-control by Mack Hagood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Below, the Beats by Dre/Kaepernick commercial.

Comments Off on Sonic control devices

Filed under Curiosities

Sound studies

Launched by Taylor & Francis in 2015, Sound studies aims to provide a forum for emergent ideas, theories, and topics, but it is also committed to an ongoing dialogue with some of the field’s rich legacy in areas such as soundscapes, sound art, film music, histories of listening, the tensions and synergies of sound and vision, and many others.

The editors also hope to initiate a broader conversation about sound across multiple geographic, social, and cultural spaces, and about how sound travels across such spaces, facilitating the formation of new communities and alliances in some cases while also creating new boundaries and distinctions in others.

Below, Matthew Herbert’s Foreign bodies, which is discussed in one of the articles in the inaugural issue—the recording assembles its sonic palette out of digestive gurgling, blood, toothbrushing, popping joints, handclaps, speech, non-verbal vocalizations, and singing.

1 Comment

Filed under New periodicals

SoundEffects

Launched by Aarhus Universitet in 2011, SoundEffects: An interdisciplinary journal of sound and sound experience is a peer-reviewed online journal that brings together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience.

The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, and sociology. To push the border of interdisciplinary sound studies into new areas, it also encourages contributions from disciplines such as psychology, health care, architecture, and sound design.

As the only international journal to take a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound, SoundEffects responds to the increasing global interest in sound studies.

Comments Off on SoundEffects

Filed under New periodicals