Ark Live—The Sonic Persona: A conversation on sound and sensing with Holger Schulze

Ark Audio

ark books is proud to present a conversation on sensing, listening and sound, based on the new book from, University of Copenhagen professor of musicology and sound studies, Holger Schulze, The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound. In The Sonic Persona, Holger Schulze undertakes a critical study of some of the most influential studies in sound since the 19th century in the natural sciences, the engineering sciences, and in media theory, confronting them with contemporary artistic practices, with experimental critique, and with disturbing sonic experiences. From Hermann von Helmholtz to Miley Cyrus, from FLUXUS to the Arab Spring, from Wavefield Synthesis to otoacoustic emissions, from premillennial clubculture to postdemocratic authoritarianism, from signal processing to human echolocation: This book presents a fundamental critique concerning recent sound theories and their anthropological concepts – and proposes an alternate, a more plastic, a visceral framework for research in the field of a cultural anthropology of sounding and listening. This anthropology of sound takes its readers and listeners on a research expedition to the multitude of alien humanoids and their surprising sonic personae: in dynamic and generative tension between predetermined auditory dispositives, miniscule and not seldomly ignored sound practices, and idiosyncratic sensory corpuses: a critique of the senses. Holger Schulze (*1970) is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He serves as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and as founding editor of the book series Sound Studies. He is the author of a Theorie der Werkgenese, a generative theory of artefacts in three volumes: Das aleatorische Spiel (2000) ? Heuristik (2005) ? Intimität und Medialität (2012). He is associated investigator at the cluster of excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung: an interdisciplinary laboratory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and founding member of the European Sound Studies Association. Since 2011 he is co-editor of the international journal for historical anthropology Paragrana, in 2008 he founded the international research network Sound in Media Culture, 2000-2009 he was a co-founder and the first head of department of the new MA-programme in Sound Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He was invited visiting professor at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg as well as lecturer at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck. He writes for Texte zur Kunst, Seismograf, Merkur, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Positionen, Deutschlandradio Kultur, der freitag. The Sonic Persona is his first monograph in English.