Over the last few days, I’ve been to a fantastic symposium called The Art of Listening – something I stumbled upon, but thankfully could capitalise on my time here and go.
(any day now peeps are gonna call me or invite when there’s something like this happening… guys? please?)
I’m not going to review it all, because, well, i want to keep some of the thoughts for myself for a while. But i might, down the track, talk about the fact that the organisers (across 4 institutions) kept speaking about it as a new area of research. And that, although not a lot of visual artists were represented*, there was a sense that this area that i’ve been focusing my life on is an interest point for those across a stack of disciplines and that they’re all conducive to one another: philosophy, architecture, history, musicology, engineering, media studies and sociology.
I’m going to mention just two things from the symposium, though:
I am now going to investigate the link between Edison Co‘s demonstration recitals of the Phonograph from the early 20th Century and the Steve Jobs/Apple model of business/promotion. I swear, from today’s presentation of Edison Co’s archives by Alexandra Hui, the similarities are uncanny.
And, I have a new brain crush on Jonathan Sterne, the Sound Studies Reader and his focus on a General History of Compression (which could also easily include Cory Arcangel‘s Essay on On Compression – especially the JPEG).
As you were.
image credit: reverb tests by wallace sabine for the new theatre, pinched from the soundscrapers blog
*except in a great paper on Christian Marclay by Lydia Goehr.