***With apologies for cross-posting***
Sound, Noise & Politics
The Bartlett School of Architecture (Room 5.04)
27 April 2017, 6-8pm
You are warmly invited to attend the next event in our Sound | Making | Space series.
'Sound, Noise & Politics' will take place on Thursday 27th April, 6-8pm, in Room 5.04 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street London.
We are delighted to confirm that our invited speakers for the evening will be Alberto Duman (Middlesex University) and Michael Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University). The event is free, but spaces are limited so please reserve your place via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sound-noise-politics-tickets-33249671663.
Alberto Duman | Middlesex University
'Playing the tune, calling the piper: the Music for Masterplanning project in Newham, London'
In 2010, the now defunct London Development Agency (LDA) and the London Borough of Newham jointly produced a promotional movie called 'London's Regeneration Supernova', to be screened at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. The aim of the film was to highlight land and property market opportunities for investment in the Borough, trailing on the forthcoming London 2012 Olympics, with particular emphasis on the Royal Docks. In 2012, I made a specific FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the London Borough of Newham, and through that request, a copy of the movie was obtained. But the peculiarity of this recovered evidence is that the film provided by Newham is a silent movie. The absence of sound for such an important piece of promotional marketing and top-down narrative of place has opened up the conceptual space for the 'Music for Masterplanning' project. Throughout 2016, 'Music for Masterplanning' has studied, researched, recorded and compiled an album's worth of different soundtracks for this silent movie into a freely available musical collection and a book+CD output. 'Music for Masterplanning' is a project about place, people and music in Newham, London. It is about how places are turned into simple stories for packaged investment opportunities, how people living in those places relate to those stories, and how music can tell different stories in many different ways.
Michael Gallagher | Manchester Metropolitan University
'Sound as affect: difference, power and spatiality'
This presentation builds on recent theorisations of sound as a form of affect. Hearing sound as affect decentres the human from the analysis of sound, a move that is helpful for developing the more-than-human politics required in the Anthropocene. It also tunes into how sound can exercise power over bodies in ways that do not depend on conscious communication. However, in taking human subjectivity out of the loop, it is important to avoid mechanistic, deterministic accounts of sonic affect, as though sound x will produce affect y. Using examples, I suggest that the relations between sound and affect are neither objective nor subjective but contextual. Sounds have repeating affective tendencies, but these unfold differently in different contexts. This contextual variability is key to understanding the relations between sonic affect, power and space.
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