Listening, Resonating, Attuning: Exploring Sound as Method

The visual has often been considered the primary mode of digital experience and analysis. The privileged position of the visual mode all too often goes unquestioned in scholarship that analyzes internet phenomena, which, through the deployment of largely visually-oriented methods such as content analysis, often struggles to rigorously incorporate other forms of sensory experience. This session seeks to focus on how we as researchers can move beyond the visual to engage with the role of sound and the sonic in analyses of digital cultures and practices. We especially focus on how “soundwork” (creative/constructed texts that employ basic sonic elements of speech, music, and noise) and sonic research-creation projects can be used as methods through which to enter investigations of digital phenomena.

The proposed session is envisioned to be a collaborative and generative space within which participants can both brainstorm potential new sound methodologies and speak about and get feedback on current projects. Throughout this session we also draw from Robinson’s understanding of listening itself as an inherently political and cultural act, thinking through the ways that settler researchers must additionally reflexively engage with our own positionality when working through/with sound.

Mar 1, 2023 10:00 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)