Media Fields: Echo/Logics

Submission Deadline: April 15^th, 2012

http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/

Media Fields Journal is pleased to announce a forthcoming special issue dedicated to sound and space. Sound, discussed by thinkers as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Michel Chion, and Jonathan Sterne, has recently emerged as a crucial site for interdisciplinary examinations of media. Caught within disciplinary boundaries, sound runs the risk of becoming restricted; music is divorced from non-music, and noise, as a chaotic force, stands outside or disrupts either system. By asking how sound constructs, expands, and transforms space, we invite contributions from across disciplines, cultures, and media platforms that explore the wide range of sound’s intersections with spatial studies. The title of our issue invokes the Greek myth of Echo to emphasize the nymph’s ability not to sound, but to re-sound or reverberate. What is the relationship between sounding and resounding, spontaneous occurrence and recorded sound?

We are interested both in historical treatments that examine innovations in sound technology and in the theoretical and aesthetic analysis of aural montage, rhythm, and synchronicity/asynchronicity. We also seek to include works that address the construction of ideological and geographical boundaries through language and voice. Contributors are invited to explore acoustic architecture and ecology, and to examine how sound mediates our relationship with our immediate environment. In this issue, we want to engage lasting questions in film and cultural studies regarding the voice as embodied signifier, the gendered primacy of visuality, or ocular-centrism, in media, and the role of sound as interruption or subversion.

We hope the issue will reflect the following questions and areas of interest, without becoming limited by them:

Does the study of sound cause a rethinking of space and time? If, following Henri Lefèbvre, rhythm comes from the interaction of a time, a place, and an expenditure of energy, does its quantification affect linear history? How does oral history restructure archival thinking? How are sound, the city, and architecture connected, and what is the role of noise pollution?

How do different sound technologies construct viewing space? How is viewing space constructed by live music or commentary (piano/orchestral accompaniment, benshi, live-tweeting, etc.)? How is sound embodied in space (the human voice)? How does recording the voice shift our understanding of language as embodiment? How do voices construct political or geographic space (speeches at protest events, GPS navigations systems)?

Does the history of animation require a different approach to the question of sound, particularly when visuals are synchronized to pre-existing sound? How have alternative animation traditions referencing sound as "visual music” been linked to sound technologies?

Submissions might also address the role of new technologies of sound recording, distribution, editing, and storage, as well as fan-constructed alternative soundtracks and official DVD commentary tracks.

We invite essays of 1500-2500 words, digital art projects, and audio or video interviews exploring possible relations between sound and space. We encourage approaches to this topic from scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture, art and art history, communication, geography, musicology, sociology, and other fields.

Feel free to contact issue co-editors, Maria Corrigan and Diana Pozo, with proposals and inquiries. Email submissions, proposals, and inquiries to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org