Sing … Then Think: Musical Interventions and Nondeliberative Forms of Practice in Social Work Groups

ABSTRACT

The positive effects of music have been demonstrated worldwide in many fields including social work, psychology, medicine, and education. Musical interventions including music listening, lyric analysis, and singing have also been found effective in group work. This article, guided by Norma Lang’s nondeliberative theory, aims to provide the “why,” “when,” and “how” of incorporating music into social work groups. It also provides the reader with a toolbox of musical interventions and the encouragement to utilize these “artful, actional, and analogic” activities in group work.     

Acoustic Cocooning

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, car manufacturers increasingly underline their cars' interior tranquility. Both this acoustic condition and the availability of car audio sets enable drivers to transform their car into a highly personal, controlled and relaxing sonic bubble.

Yet how could the car, once a noisy contraction, evolve into such a space for acoustic cocooning? This article studies the introduction of car radio and interior car sound design in Europe between the 1920s and the 1990s. The car radio's meaning shifted from an artifact that brought companionship to lonely drivers, to an instrument that helped drivers to mentally block out their fellows on the road. At the same time, listening to engine sounds changed from a drivers' skill to a practice drivers had to de-learn. Moreover, car sound construction shifted from reducing noise to creating target sounds for specific consumer groups.

This article employs three forms of cultural analysis to understand these shifts: an “archeology of corporate culturology,” the symbolism of sound, and Gerhard schulze's theory on the experience society. Finally, by analyzing the rise of acoustic cocooning in the car, it aims to contribute to the study of “techno-cocooning”: the use of technology for creating sensory privacy.     

Learning How to Listen: Kroncong Music in a Javanese Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider several weeks of music rehearsals that took place in an urban neighborhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. The music “rehearsed” by a group of men is kroncong; an urban folk music incorporating a string band, flute, vocals and sometimes a keyboard that in Indonesia dates to the arrival of the Portuguese and the establishment of urban enclaves of traders and slaves in the sixteenth century along the north coast of Java. The melancholy and other historically anchored sensorial sentiments evoked by the totality of sound and image that comprises the songs, as well as the activities and associations that go into making kroncong music, are referred to as kroncong sensibilia. The discussion of sensibilia follows an analytical path that begins with the poetics of the musical genre and moves on to an examination of the politics of kroncong sensibilia in a particular context of social relations. For the Javanese men of the neighborhood, the making of kroncong music was at one level a nostalgic response to their urban lives. However, perhaps more importantly, making kroncong music was a tactical and strategic act of sound and sentiment, a particularly masculine one, seeking “recognition” within an “aesthetic community” and built world of social relations increasingly organized around and by, if not centered on, women.     

Towards a sonic ecology of urban life: ethnography of sound perception in Cairo

ABSTRACT

This study on sound perception in Cairo uses a methodological procedure described in a previous issue of this journal [11(3)]. The procedure involves equipping inhabitants of Cairo, the Egyptian capital, with binaural microphones that record the surrounding urban sounds during one of their daily journeys (without the researcher). Participants later describe and comment on the sounds while listening to the recording. Analysis of this material allowed us first to establish an organized lexicon in categories. We identified a structured “natural language of sounds”. The data obtained reveal covert categories that describe three key domains of urban life: the active city, the city in movement, and the relational city. A principal finding is that sound perception systematically relates sounds to their origin, i.e. both the source and its social situation. This socialization of sound led us to the notion of “sound constructs” as products of an immediate socialization of the perception of sound. Experiment clarifies how perception operates in Cairo, notably through territory differentiation using sonic saliences and soundmarks. Finally, we propose a “sonic ecology” of the city: how residents collectively experience the sound dimensions of their urban territory, navigate between very different territories, recognize them and respond to them.     

Sensing Voice

ABSTRACT

Through a consideration of the underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, this article addresses the inherent relation between materiality and the voice, the sensed and the embodied. I focus on the physical and sensory properties of singers' and listeners' bodies; the space within and the matter through which sound disperses; and how the relation between these aspects plays an integral part in what it feels like to sing, and what it is possible to hear. I aim to demonstrate that a sensory reading of singing and listening may capture dimensions of the voice that are difficult, if not impossible, to account for using conventional analyses of music or standard readings of vocal repertoire. However, a sensory approach to sound does not offer a stable explanation of what sound or music is. Instead each such account unveils a composite manifestation of our understanding of sound at a given moment in time and space.     

Head Cocoons

ABSTRACT

Listening with the aid of headphones was at the heart of the early radio culture of the 1920s. After those years, however, earphones became the exception as loudspeakers became the norm. For quite some time thereafter, the wiring of hearing was limited to the use of monaural earbuds in situations where the use of loudspeakers would have disturbed others. In West Germany, the binaural headphone started to make a comeback in the late 1960s due to the growing fragmentation of family life along with the widening range of electronic leisure possibilities and the rise of hi-fi culture. It was only at the end of the twentieth century, however, that binaural headphone listening emerged as the dominant culture of listening and caught up with the burgeoning mobile urban life style.

Taking the case of West Germany, this article asks: What is the impact of ear-wiring on social life? And, what new kinds of perception result from headphone listening? It traces how the use of earphones turned from being a static “technique of listening” into a mobile “technique of acoustic privatization.” Ultimately, this article interprets today's portable headphones as “head cocoons” that enable mobile listeners to actively carve out sonic privacy while on the move.     

Sensuous stories in the Indian Ocean islands*

Abstract

Providing examples from the islands of the Indian Ocean Region, this article focuses on the multisensory nature of storytelling and listening. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the region (1998–2016), the author proposes a sensuous epistemology that turns on listening to “sense”. She reveals that storytelling can be a profoundly sensuous experience that elicits emotional and physical responses in both the teller and listener. The sensuous quality of stories enable the listener to fully encounter politically inscribed, complex social experiences. Ultimately, the article advances a notion of listening as sense-work, thereby deepening sensory scholarship’s recent, politically reflexive analysis on listening to hear.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Sounding Out Vision

ABSTRACT

The late-twentieth century development of a range of digital imaging technologies has led to claims that we are in the midst of a transformation of representation. This essay takes two such technologies—ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—and considers how their extraordinary mediation of the invisible using radio waves, magnetic fields and sound waves confounds the terms of reference which have governed the way we think not only about images, but about visual perception itself.

The nineteenth-century visual technology of the stethoscope, and its synaesthetic fusion of sound and image, is posed as a way of thinking through medical imaging technologies' sonic and haptic picturing of a world beyond light. Hegel's aesthetics, and his consideration of sound as a more ideal medium than light, is also used to consider the ways in which ultrasound and MRI images mediate the products of sound—the depth, interiority and identity of a body—into the realm of vision and the image.     

Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals

ABSTRACT

This paper considers contemporary practice in “fused” or transcoded audiovisual art, focusing on the work of Australian artists Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow. In this practice sound and image are tightly linked by a cross-wiring of media signals. Synesthesia is often invoked around such work, proposing a parallel between perceptual and technical cross-wiring. This synesthetic analogy provides a historical context as well as an analytic frame; it is tested here through a reading of relevant neuro- and perceptual science that illustrates some striking parallels. Ultimately, however, an alternative model is proposed based on cross-modal binding, where stimuli in different modalities are “bound” into correlated wholes. Understood as cross-modal objects, transcoded audiovisuals direct us to the signal that underpins both sound and image, as well as to the map, or domain of correlation, between modalities. The wider significance of this practice, it is argued, lies in its ability to provide an aesthetic and affective manifestation of these abstract structures—structures that are central to new media culture, but largely imperceptible.     

Chinese Literature's Transformation and Digital Existence in the New Century

数字化传媒的革故鼎新已成为推动中国文学世纪转型的强大引擎。网络文学的市 场化崛起打破了传统文学的原有平衡,让当今文学的整体格局遭遇数字技术的创生性 重整。第四媒体不可抗拒的技术力量导致文学大范围转向“数字化生存”,从存在方 式和表意体制上改写了文学惯例。这需要我们厘清数字化媒体在文学转型中“消解” 与“建构”的双重功能,以便从不同的学理维度上为文论拓新建构数字化生存时代的 文学观念,使数字媒介对传统的挑战变成未来文学别创新声的契机,让新媒介成为新 世纪中国文学的强劲动力和有效资源。

关键词: 中国文学?世纪转型?数字化生存

The reform ignited by digital media provided strong impetus to literary transformation at the turn of century in China. The market‐led rise of online literature has destroyed the balance of traditional literature and resulted in a fundamental digital readjustment of the overall literary structure. The fourth medium, with its irresistible technological force, has led to a large‐scale literary shift towards “being digital,” thereby changing literary traditions of existence and expression. Such being the case, we need to clarify digital media's dual function of “deconstruction” and “construction” in this literary shift so as to input new ideas from a different academic perspective into literary theory of the digital era, turn digital media's challenge to tradition into a chance for literary innovation and make the new media into a powerful driving force and effective resource for Chinese literature in the new century.     

Training by feel: wearable fitness-trackers,endurance athletes,and the sensing of data

ABSTRACT

A wide range of wearable fitness-trackers are currently available that allow users to measure, monitor, visualize, and record numerous training metrics including moving pace, distance traveled, average heart rate, and calories burned. Using qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews with amateur endurance athletes, this paper examines what individuals do with their wearable fitness-trackers and the data they produce. Drawing on the work of Deborah Lupton and Sarah Maslen, we take up the concepts of “data sensing” and the “more-than-human sensorium” to highlight the embodied and sensory dimensions of digital self-tracking. We argue that while much of the appeal of fitness-tracking technologies lies in their ability to generate objective readings of one’s performance, these devices do not supplant less quantifiable and more subjective ways of understanding one’s self. On the contrary, the participants in our study use the quantitative data generated by a fitness-tracker in conjunction with their own self-assessments to gain a more holistic sense of what they are experiencing during training or on race day. For many of our research participants, the fitness-tracker became a central part of their identity and daily routine. Most participants were reluctant to train without their fitness-trackers, even when not preparing for an event.     

Rethinking the Soundscape

ABSTRACT

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term's use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer's work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term “soundscape” emerges as at once indispensable and elusive, provocative and limited. By calling attention to background sound, Schafer shaped the field in ways that exceeded his own contribution.     

Introducing audio-vision into evidence: the impact of audio recordings and their technical limitations in police use of force cases

ABSTRACT

This article explores the technical limitations of audio recordings and how those limitations impact the reliability of sound evidence in police use of force cases. In audiovisual recordings, audio is often assumed neutral, redundant or to have the same limitations as its visual counterpart. Bringing together film theorist Michel Chion’s concept of audio-vision and the technical specifications of mobile audio recording, this article highlights how design priorities and compression processes can influence the way sound evidence is perceived. By failing to acknowledge audio recordings as distinct from their visual counterparts, they are rendered invisible and are therefore under scrutinized throughout legal processes. This neglect becomes notably problematic in cases of police use of force where audio/visual recordings often work to bolster the already privileged officer testimony.     

Norma Lang’s Use of Nondeliberative Approaches: Through a Multidimensional Lens of Activity in Social Work Groups

ABSTRACT

This article is intended to enter into a conversation with the significant work done by Norma Lang on nondeliberative approaches in social work with groups, and, in particular, her use of these approaches in working with people who have limited social skills. The intention is to locate significant strands of her conceptualizing, teaching, and practice within a discussion of the concept “activity”—a concept that social work with groups has uniquely contributed to social work theory and practice. It is proposed that aspects of “activity” can be more fully understood and analyzed using a number of intersecting dimensions: interaction, purpose, meaning, and analog.     

Revisiting demand,politicization and externalization in authoritarian political regimes: policy advisory system in Russian practices

ABSTRACT

This study contributes to debate on three related questions in Policy Advisory System research. Is the Policy Advisory System concept applicable in countries other than developed democracies? How does it function in a state-centred authoritarian regime? How does the authoritarian environment affect tendencies such as “politicization” and “externalization”? These questions are addressed using materials on the current Russian governance structure and advisory practices, focusing on two broadly defined “governance subsystems” in the Presidential Administration of Russia, “Political Bloc” and “Economic Bloc”, both acting as regular customers for advisory communities. One finding is the phenomenon of “Dual Demand” from the same centre of power—“stability” for “Political Bloc” and “innovation” for “Economic Bloc”—which contributed to creation of two different clusters of policy advisory agencies with different statuses. Other findings include transformation of “politicization” to policy control mechanisms and attempted “externalization” turning into the reverse—“internalization”—bringing independent advisory organizations under the supervision of government structures.     

Attitudes towards reproductive technologies for humans

Abstract

The aim of this exploratory study was to measure attitudes towards various applications of real and hypothetical reproductive technologies for humans, including prenatal gender selection. A total of 121 undergraduate university students completed a questionnaire measuring knowledge, interest, trust, risks and benefits, and attitudes towards reproductive technologies for humans. An exploratory factor analysis showed that participants rated the use of these technologies as unacceptable if it was for personal enhancement but acceptable for “medically useful” applications. Participants also reported not having a gender preference for their (hypothetical) unborn child, were they to use prenatal gender selection, an application very few approved of. Results failed to support a general desire to use prenatal gender selection or to hypothetically favour one gender over the other. Attitudes towards reproductive technologies cannot be simply summarised in a “pro or against” manner as they heavily depend on the context.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

E-Nose for News?

ABSTRACT

Many journalists claim to have a “nose for news.” This metaphor, where a body part is used in a transferred sense for metaphorical change has occupied a central place in journalists' discourses. It appears to express something essential about their identity, profession, practice, and how they “see” and experience the world. This article uses the figure/ground approach of Marshall McLuhan to inform an exploration of the “nose for news” metaphor. By studying the “nose for news” we can understand how and why electronic noses and the Internet have made this once vital and living metaphor obsolete. We can also discover ways to reanimate this metaphor in order to: (a) help recover something of the essence of journalism expressed by journalists' claims to possess a “nose for news,” and (b) re-conceptualize the current “crisis” in journalism.