Alexandra Supper

Sublime Frequencies: The Construction of Sublime Listening Experiences in the Sonification of Scientific Data

In the past two decades, the sonification of scientific data – an auditory equivalent of data visualization in which data are turned into sounds – has become increasingly widespread, particularly as an artistic practice and as a means of popularizing science. Sonification is thus part of the recent trend, discussed in public understanding of science literature, towards increased emphasis on ‘interactivity’ and ‘crossovers’ between science and art as a response to the perceived crisis in the relationship between the sciences and their publics. However, sonification can also be understood as the latest iteration in a long tradition of theorizing the relations between nature, science and human experience. This article analyses the recent public fascination with sonification and argues that sonification grips public imaginations through the promise of sublime experiences. I show how the ‘auditory sublime’ is constructed through varying combinations of technological, musical and rhetorical strategies. Rather than maintain a singular conception of the auditory sublime, practitioners draw on many scientific and artistic repertoires. However, sound is often situated as an immersive and emotional medium in contrast to the supposedly more detached sense of vision. The public sonification discourse leaves intact this dichotomy, reinforcing the idea that sound has no place in specialist science.

Sounds Convincing: Modes of Listening and Sonic Skills in Knowledge Making

Abstract This article investigates the role of listening in the knowledge making practices of Western scientists, engineers, and physicians from the 1920s onwards. It does so by offering a two-dimensional typology of the modes of listening that they employ. Distinguishing between two dimensions allows us to make sense both of the purpose and of the ways in which scientists, engineers, and physicians have listened to their objects of study; and it also allows us to appreciate the importance of shifting between modes of listening. At the same time, we argue, understanding the role of sound in knowledge making cannot be limited to the study of listening alone; rather, we have to pay attention to how listening is embedded in broader sonic skills — including the handling of tools for the making, recording, storing, and retrieving of sounds.

Sound Information: Sonification in the Age of Complex Data and Digital Audio

In recent years, sonification—the auditory display of data—has received increasing media attention and been presented as a solution to the challenges posed by large, complex datasets. By analyzing the development of the sonification research community, this article shows that specific historical configurations have led the community to concentrate on technical solutions for the design of sonification technology rather than on analyzing and interpreting sonified data. Consequently, sonification still struggles for scientific acceptance and does not offer any ready-made solutions to the problems posed by complex data; indeed, it echoes, rather than solves, these problems.

Lobbying for the ear, listening with the whole body: the (anti-)visual culture of sonification

Abstract Sonification, the transformation of data into sound, is often argued to challenge the “visual culture” of science. Based on an analysis of rhetorical discourses as well as bodily practices within the sonification community, I show that the relationship between sonification and visual culture is in fact more complex and ambivalent: in publications and interviews, sonification researchers blame visual practices for the marginalisation of sound, but also look up to visualisation as a role model. I argue that this delicate balancing act can be regarded as an expression of what historian of science Thomas Kuhn has referred to as the “essential tension” of science between convention and iconoclasm; here: between questioning a scientific status quo (equated with a “visual bias”) and conforming to it. Turning towards the sonic and embodied skills involved in doing sonification work, I show that the different sensory modalities, which seem so neatly bounded in discourses about sonification, are intimately intertwined in practice.

Sonic skills in cultural contexts: theories, practices and materialities of listening

Since 2011, an artist collective called New Orleans Airlift has been building “music boxes” that transform architectural structures and salvaged materials into artistic installations. One such music box – dubbed the Shantytown Sound Laboratory – was built from the remains of a 250-yearold Creole cottage that had collapsed on the site of the future installation after the passing of Hurricane Katrina. The collective used its materials to erect several new structures, while developing and incorporating new experimental musical instruments into its walls, ceilings and floors. In rehearsals, jam sessions and community workshops, the collective and the community experiment with the acoustical properties of these instruments and their environment, sounding out the relationships between music, sound and material culture. Part performance, part experimental installation and part educational site, the music boxes are fluid objects that generate examination of their acoustic, material and cultural contexts. As sound laboratories engaging the practical and experimental skills of carpenters, music technologists, blacksmiths, architects, musicians, sound artists and “wing nut tinkerers” (Pett 2015), they may also provoke a technical and aesthetic investigation into the nature of sound, raise questions of what it means to play a musical instrument, or use the resulting sounds to scrutinise the politics that gives shape to local environments. The aim of this special issue is to investigate how material objects prompt new ways of listening. The contributors examine a set of concrete artefacts, digital data, musical technologies and built environments that users have made or repurposed to attune themselves in different ways to their senses, acoustic environments and theories of listening. Borrowing the title of the New Orleans installations, we may conceive of these objects as “music boxes” that enable acoustic, material and cultural contexts to be sounded out. With the collection, we wish to explore the entanglement of theories, practices and materialities of sound. In the course of that exploration, we address such questions as: What kind of knowledge can be gained from listening with and to material objects or environments? How do those involved in such practices engage their ears to listen? How are concrete practices of listening related to theories about sound, musicality and knowledge, and how are they embedded in specific local and material cultures? The articles collected here all investigate such practices in a wide range of cultural and material contexts – both historical and contemporary. Their authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including musicology, history, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Yet they share a certain affinity for science and technology studies (STS), and thus for the objects, tools and instruments that are used to produce and hear sound. The metaphor of the music box may therefore also be read as playing on that other box metaphor, so deeply entwined with the emergence of STS: the “black box”. Once “closed”, in classic STS parlance, black boxes allow us to forget the complex interactions between actors, objects and technologies that they presuppose (Latour 1987; Pinch and Bijker 1987). Opening these boxes, then, our authors show how knowledge through sound is always in the making, resonating between listeners, material artefacts and cultural contexts.

Doctoral Dissertation Defences: Performing Ambiguity between Ceremony and Assessment

Abstract Dissertation defenses are ambiguous affairs, which mark both the end of a long process of doctoral education and the inauguration of a doctoral candidate into a body of experts. At Maastricht University (and other Dutch universities), the decision to award a doctoral degree is made on the basis of the written dissertation well before the defense, which makes the ambiguous status of the event between examination and celebration especially evident. Nevertheless, participants attach importance to the event because it impacts the reputation of individual researchers, as well as that of research groups and of the host-university itself. Taking a Goffmanian perspective on the event as a performance, it becomes clear that the ambiguity in the definition between celebration and assessment is contained within the script that details how the performance should be conducted. In this script, participants’ role is unclear, providing them the means to act in accordance with their own definition of the event. The ambiguous definition of the event is performed at an individual level but also in team performances, in which participants correct each other when someone’s behavior appears too celebratory. Amidst this ambiguity between celebration and assessment, the university reinforces its own authority to award doctoral degrees, acting as a gate-keeping institution to the academic world.