ESA Conference: The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs

Call for Papers

The Conference

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond—
Invisible, as Music—
But positive, as Sound—
It beckons, and it baffles—
– Emily Dickinson, “This World is not Conclusion”

If we take seriously Jacques Attali’s claim that the world is “not legible, but audible,” that soundscapes portend cultural changes, how do our critical strategies change? What scholarly shifts are possible by turning our focus to acts of listening and representations of sound? Sound has long been represented in literature, philosophy, art, and science, but we are only now encountering a ‘sonic boom’ in critical and theoretical writings on sound in the humanities and social sciences (Sterne). Steve Goodman, for example, proposes we adopt an “ontology of vibrational force” as a way of reorienting ourselves in the world as critics, and Jane Bennett has shown that to attend to the “vibrant” world is to recognize that all matter is dynamic rather than fixed. Taking up Goodman’s premise that “all entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities,” we invite papers that stretch the definitional boundaries of sound and its representations in our objects of study. How can re-orienting our approaches to vibration, music, sound, noise, silence, and the under-notes alter conceptions of how our scholarship exists in a world whose meaning is not easily conveyed, but rather reverberates beneath the surface?

What undersongs have we not attended to? When we listen for sound, we often focus on the inflections and sounds that are audible and legible to us. Yet, not all music occurs within our registers of hearing: some noises we dismiss rather than finding music in them.  Just as when we read, not all meanings are straight-forward but rather become legible only through subtext and undercurrents. We invite papers that consider the spaces between words, pauses between calls and responses, and the breaths and rests that produce multidimensional rhythms, harmonies, discordances, resolutions, and meanings, the undersong that carries the burden of a song, thechorus, the refrain (Dryden). If we scramble our notions of language, what other sounds, voices, musics, or understandings might become legible or audible to us?

We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to sound and:

  • Aesthetics
  • Affect
  • Archives and technology
  • Being and consciousness
  • Disability studies
  • Echoes and reverberation
  • Ecologies
  • Embodiment and touch
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Literature, language, and poetics
  • Memory and subjectivity
  • The nonhuman and post-human
  • Object-oriented ontology
  • Organic and mechanical sounds
  • Performance
  • Phenomenology
  • Politics, speaking out
  • Power and empowerment
  • Race studies
  • Reader response theory
  • Science, neuroaesthetics
  • Semiotics
  • Silence, the inaudible, and the inarticulate
  • Space, place, and landscape
  • Spiritualism and meditation
  • Temporalities

The English Student Association (ESA) Sound Conference is on March 31, 2017. Please submit your abstract here by December 1, 2016. In addition to papers, we welcome proposals for performances of music, sound art, and multimedia presentations. Accepted performances would likely be held in the Martin E. Segal Theatre or break-out rooms. Please submit 250-word descriptions of your planned performance here, including information about necessary audio equipment, number of performers, and any other requirements for performance space. Recorded examples are welcome but not necessary. You may find further information about our planned performance space here. Abstracts for papers and planned performances are due by December 1, 2016. We will be notifying applicants of our decision no later than January 15, 2017.