How is sound curated? How does sound affect concepts and practices of curation? What are the affordances of sound recordings in material and/or digital formats for acts of curation? What are the political and ethical considerations of making archival sounds public? How might curated audio collections make us feel, and why? Hinging on the distinction between sound as a vibrational, audibly perceivable entity and signal as a representational entity of that sound made manifest through recording and its preservation, these fundamental questions amplify the tension between sound as abstract and immaterial, and signal as artifactual and discernible. The “Introduction” to this special issue explores concepts and examples of sound and their signals in relation to acts of curation.
TECHNOLOGIES OF FABULOUS, TRANSMEDIAL DRAG & MINOR DIGITIZATION
Trans- Feminist and Queer Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods-of-Scale
T.L. Cowan
This performance-essay begins with a crip-biographical narrative that accounts sickness, lateness, and disorder and swerves away from a productive-only sense of scholarly value. Building significantly on the work of artist Wendy Coburn and her posthumous retrospective exhibition “Fables for Tomorrow,” it identifies and offers an account for “technologies of fabulous”: applied knowledges that are practiced within, and emerge from, the small-world possibilities created by, and small-scale methods at work in, cabaret and other minor Trans-Feminist and Queer (TFQ) spaces; the methods we use to re-access these site-specific and translocal knowledges once an event has passed; and the techniques of knowledge production that make possible the performance or production.
THE AMODERNS: MATERIAL RESONANCE
A Feature Interview with Tanya E. Clement
Jason Camlot, Tanya E. Clement
Jason Camlot interviews Tanya Clement about key terms she introduces in her recent book, Dissonant Records, as concepts useful for critical listening to archival audio. Some of the terms discussed include: amplify, distortion, interference, compression, and reception. This transcript is an excerpt from a longer interview Camlot conducted with Clement on December 14th, 2024, as part of Camlot's Literary Listening project, designed to demonstrate the importance of sound studies for literary study through discussions with researchers from diverse disciplines about the concepts and practical approaches they use to listen in their scholarly and critical work.
CURATING POETRY RELATIONALLY AS SOUND
Four Modes of Literary Event Organisation
Klara du Plessis
This essay maps out concepts and methods for a formal analysis of the poetry reading event and series. This research foregrounds and resuscitates the agential and often underrepresented role of the literary event curator, and investigates literature as sound through mediating acts of curation and as a dynamic construct called the curatorial. The speculative nature of this research informs the schematisation of four curatorial modes with which to catalogue different priorities manifested in poetry reading curation, namely framed, open, self, and deep curation. The four curatorial modes offer varying ratios of shared agency and directorship between curators and performing poets over the imaginary of the literary event.
DO I HAVE TIME FOR ONE MORE?
Co-curating the Marvin Francis Audio
Jason Wiens, Duncan Mercredi
Our dialogically-composed essay discusses our co-curation of a SpokenWeb-sponsored event with audio recordings from the Marvin Francis fonds at the University of Manitoba, held at Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg in April 2023. Francis was a Cree poet and playwright active in the Winnipeg arts community in the 1990s and early 2000s, up until his death in 2005. We discuss the event in the broader context of the Marvin Francis archive and of Francis’ practice, and consider the role of this curatorial project in collective memory and affect, as well as the different political and ethical considerations of a project of this kind.
WORD OF MOUTH
Unearthing the Sounds of Underwhich Audiographics
Brandon Hocura
Under the guidance of poet and musician Richard Truhlar, the radical publishing cooperative Underwhich Editions released over 40 audio albums between 1978 and 1994, comprising its peerless Audiographic Series. Primarily released on hand-dubbed cassettes the albums span a wide field of experimental sound, from electronic music and sound poetry to out-jazz improvisations and avant-garde composition. This essay provides a critical introduction to the Audiographics Series and discussion of the preservation initiative currently underway as part of the Siren Recordings Sonic Poetry Archive. Additionally, this issue includes a discography, bibliography, and curated audio compilation surveying the broad range of sound works, with an emphasis on the intersection of recording technology, freeform sound, and materiality of language.
A VOICE OF THEIR OWN
Polyvocal Feminist Curation in 1980s UAlberta Radio
Chelsea Miya, Nicholas Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon
This multimedia essay “re-sounds” Voiceprint, a 1980s University of Alberta campus radio show created by students Jars Balan and Terri Wynnyk. First, we provide a historical overview of the series alongside the circumstances of its rediscovery, digitization, cataloguing, and curation. Second, we examine how the showrunners mobilize polyvocality – foregrounding discord and disharmony – as both an eco-acoustic aesthetic and political strategy. In articulating a feminist (and anarchist) ethos of plurality, diversity, and social justice, Voiceprint helped foster emerging activist communities, much like how scholarly podcasts do today, through its contributions to contemporary debates surrounding gender and language. Our “unarchiving” of Voiceprint demonstrates how curatorial interventions can unfold across space and time, allowing sonic events to reverberate well beyond their original moment.
OUR LOVE OF MUSIC CLOSER TOGETHER
On Time is Away
J Shea-Carter
Our Love of Music Closer Together revolves around and features the first academic interview with the duo behind the NTS Radio broadcast Time is Away. Throughout a series of five interrelated sections Our Love explores how Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney uniquely expand the imaginative limits of cross-disciplinary curation through their creative implementation of text, sound, music, and voice.
TRANSCRIPTION AS CURATION
Encountering Sonic Traces of Emotion in Archived Colonial Radio Programs
Luc Marraffa
In my work on French and Dutch colonial radio archives (1945-1950), I use written transcriptions to attune my readers to sounds which exceed speech. I argue that transcribing recorded speech into text is not a neutral act; it is a curatorial gesture which defines what signals are recognized as sound, and which are cast out as mere noise. By documenting non-verbal cues in recordings, I render people’s emotions visible in the transcriptions. Building on Annette Hoffmann’s concept of close listening, I discuss how adding layers of meaning to the recorded speech can be a modality of care. I argue that care, in the context of discourses normalising colonialism, may entail withholding empathy and decentring the intended message of the speaker by ignoring the semantic elements of the signal and focusing instead on the material qualities of their speech.
CURATING NOISE
The Queerness of Sound in Action
Christopher Reeves
This essay is a theoretical investigation and mediation on the queerness of noise and its potential as a workable medium in curatorial endeavors. Through museological case studies and smaller scale conceptual curatorial endeavors, I seek to provoke further questions about the way sound and noise can be used to expand upon already existing modes of exhibiting unwieldy art materials. .
SOUND DRAWS US TOGETHER
Irene Revell and Sarah Shin in Conversation with Klara du Plessis
Klara du Plessis, Irene Revell, Sarah Shin
Irene Revell and Sarah Shin co-edited an expansive collection of over fifty contributions centring feminist sonic cultures and radical listening practices, Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024). The wide variety of contributions harmonise to produce a collective community space in the pages of the book. In “Sound Draws Us Together,” Klara du Plessis talks to Revell and Shin about their project of creating an affective space where sound can resonate thematically, but also as physical bodies of sound in conceptual allusion to its own status as signal.