Noise: A Counter-Map

About

Tuesday 14 April 2020 | 6.30pm - 8.30pm
Nottingham Contemporary

Study Sessions are informal and intimate discussion groups. Throughout 2020, our study-as-listening-sessions, Sonic Continuum, explore how sound and rhythm create forms of attunement between the self and the world. Readings and discussions explore the sonic, the auditory and the aural spanning philosophy, history, politics, finance and biology. The sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand and ask: how can listening practices produce sociality?

Although it is often thought of as unwanted or undesirable, noise is key to how we think about sound. By separating the concept of noise from sound, certain voices are amplified while others are silenced. As a concept, noise can evoke affective resonances, ethical problems, political questions and aesthetic strategies. In this study session, we use noise as a critical filter through which to think about auditory technocultures and touch on themes such as listening, aesthetic moralism and sonic normativity.

Through an introductory talk, a range of audiovisual and written materials and discussion, this study session seeks to map out noise's environmental, communicative, political and artistic echoes.

Join one session or all. Booking is required as places are limited.

Marie Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Lincoln's School of Film and Media. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She is a founding participant (with Annie Goh) of Sonic Cyberfeminisms, an ongoing project critically and creatively interrogating the relationship between sound, gender, technology and feminism. Thompson is currently working on a collaborative project on tinnitus, auditory knowledge and the arts.