Understanding Audio Papers
For the assignment in this unit Sound Studies and Aural Cultures, we have been requested to develop an Audio Paper. This format is an innovative practice within the academic world, and it approaches the essay field, but from a distinctive and more creative perspective, allowing us to work with sound as a material, and take advantage of it’s nuances through voice, music and sound design among other uses.
The audio paper brings a wide variety of possibilities as a format, in order to explore a topic. As we have seen on the Audio Paper Manifesto by Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson, an audio paper makes a difference with the written formats into some different aspects, for instance, the audio paper approaches the performative aesthetics, becoming an experimental way of supporting academic arguments; the audio paper is idiosyncratic, and is allows to have multiple protagonists to name a few of these features.
Choosing my topic
Now I have to find a topic for my audio paper, and this will be Prophecies in Sound or people who have predicted events that would happen in the future, in the world of sound and music technologies. The main argument that brought me into this path of research is the concept of the Sound-houses, written by Francis Bacon back in the 17th century. In this passage of an old novel, Bacon describe with an awesome detail some practices relating music and sound, like the use of electronic intruments and effects sound processing. I read these writings for first time on the book “The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music” on an essay included in the book by Andrew Hugill called “The Origins of Electronic Music”.
The second piece of writing that put me in this line of research were some writings from Edgard Varese, where he explains his visions in the world of music and sound, and he makes some accurate predictions that could resemble with precision with laptop musicians, digital recording or the use of MIDI to reproduce music. I read this fragments in the book Audio Culture by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (An awesome book that I borrowed from LCC’s library), and after some further research, I found that Varese was also famous for his prophecies in electronic music, so I thought that it would be great to investigate a little bit more to find more similar cases, and this assignement and the audio paper was a perfect opportunity to do it.
Research
I started then to do my research about other visionaries in the world of sound and music and I quickly found that there were many of these cases, not only in the field of music technology but there are many cases in which lyrics from songs have predicted the future in different ways, and of course people who were advanced to their time and predicted changes on the technology. I really didn’t want to focus on other prophecies apart from the related with the sound devices of the future, but I have to say that I’ve found very interesting informations, and is worth to investigate about these predictions that in some cases used music to advance what would happen in politics, history or in the life of the musicians themselves.
To research the topic I used various routes, but mainly reading books that I had at home or I borrowed from the library; and also online, with the use of the browsing engines, and Google Scholars, having found very interesting material, like an e-book version of “Sylva Sylvarum”, a very old book from the 17th Century from Francis Bacon, where he speaks about fascinating experiments in acoustics. I also spend some hours in the library, using the UAL Library Catalogue, finding a couple of books about Varese and other about general sound and music history.
This research ended with 5 interesting artist to study, all of them having predicted changes in the future of music industry, and these 5 subject would compose the main body of my Audio Paper. These writers and musicians will appear in chonological order in the work, and they are: Francis Bacon, Edward Bellamy, Edgard Varese, John Philip Sousa and Jim Morrison. The audio piece will also have an intro and conclusion section and will be accompanied by music from these artists, some own compositions and sound effects.