In 1977 the American composer John Cage created 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs of New York. The work’s score is a map of New York City and features 49 superimposed triangles. Each triangle symbolizes a waltz. Cage obtained each point of the triangles via chance operations to pin down a specific location. Performers of 49 Waltzes visit each identified location to capture its sounds and sights to experience, treasure and document the acoustic ecology of a place.
Cage encouraged transcriptions of this work for other places. Thus students of ASU’s School of Music and Arts, Media and Engineering teamed up to transcribe this work for their Tempe campus. The ASU Art Museum is presenting the Arizona premiere of their realization of 49 Waltzes as an audio-visual installation.
This is an exciting opportunity for the public to work with students to make their own Tempe campus waltz which will be added to the exhibition.
Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and theatre, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance of the Americas. As Associate Dean, she convenes the Herberger Research Council, serves as the liaison between Herberger faculty and ASU\s Office for Knowledge Enterprise Development, assists in the identification of funding opportunities and development of grant proposals, and helps link Herberger faculty to other faculty across ASU who share similar research interests. Her own research is in the area of the arts and cultural wellbeing.
She will offer welcoming remarks and open the Symposium.
Keynote
“The Ordering of Sounds. The Homogenization of Listening in the Age Of Globalized Soundscapes”
Sabine Breitsameter (Professor for Sound and Mediaculture, Hochschule Darmstadt/Soundscape- and Environmental Media Lab)
During the last two to three decades, it has become more and more difficult to distinguish the big cities on our planet from one another by their acoustic appearance. The majority of them have experienced a significant change of soundscapes, which has resulted in an ongoing assimilation of their sonic environments, and a loss of their acoustic identities.
The keynote will explore how this loss of auditory diversity can be perceived. It will identify parameters of assimilation and investigate reasons for this development. What sounds have arisen instead and why? What is responsible for the disappearance and/or transition to sounds and sonic experiences?
In addition, the talk will examine the ways in which listening occurs, as shaped by habits and media, and as they are closely related to the basic laws, priorities, deficiencies, and power relationships within society. What are the driving influences that shape an ordering of sounds within the perceptual system, claiming at the same time that this is a pre-stabilized, “naturally” given sonic system, to which we have to adapt our listening abilities?
The argument assumes that auditory phenomena, their methods of listening, as well as the auditory sense itself are appropriated by prevalent societal and political conditions. What do these methods of listening suggest and what does the aural appropriation stand for? What do they reveal about our societal systems, can such an "ordering of sounds" be changed, and why should it be changed at all?
“Listening to the Land: Sound Ecologies in O'odham Words, Stories, and Songs”
O'odham have been keen observers of life in the desert from time immemorial. Naturally, these observations engage all of the senses, accumulating knowledge about particular species and also relationships between them. This roundtable explores some aspects of O’odham Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by considering some of the ways in which sound ecology is encoded in the onomatopoetic aspects of the O'odham language, stories about listening to voices in the land, and bird songs that map routes of travel and record history.
Ofelia Zepeda is a MacArthur Fellow and a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is well-known scholarly for her work on the O'odham language in linguistics, her advocacy for indigenous language revitalization and maintenance, and her poetry in both English and O'odham.
David Martinez is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University. He specializes in American Indian intellectual history, art and aesthetics, and folklore studies.
Simon Lopez is a cowboy, curer, and traditional singer.
Seth Schermerhorn is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. He specializes in the interdisciplinary study of the indigenous religious traditions of the southwest, particularly O'odham pilgrimages to Magdalena, Sonora.
The presentation will provide an overview of Desert Initiative, a regional and global collaboration connecting desert communities through artist-led research and projects that investigate pressing critical issues of our time and place as contemporary societies in urbanizing desert environments.
The presentation will examine the potential for collaboration between artists, scientists and other researchers to drive innovation, shift cultural behaviors, communicate ideas and find solutions to challenges. Through a series of collaborative, artist-driven projects, Desert Initiative is developing a new post-disciplinary framework to forge new pathways into a more resilient future and cultivating ecologies of change.
The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations and individuals in Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia that share a common concern with the state of the world's soundscapes. WFAE members represent a multi-disciplinary spectrum of individuals engaged in the study of the social, cultural and ecological aspects of the sonic environment.
International WFAE conferences are held throughout the world with the most recent ones hosted in Mexico City (2009), Koli Finland (2010), and Corfu Greece (2011).
WFAE'S Mission:
WFAE works in collaboration with its world-wide network of Affiliated Organizations to promote:
Education - in listening to the soundscape, sharpening aural awareness and deepening listeners' understanding of environmental sounds and their meanings
Research and Study - of the social, cultural, scientific and ecological aspects of the sonic environment
Publishing and Distributing of information and research on Acoustic Ecology.
Protecting and Preserving existing natural soundscapes and times and places of quiet.
Designing and Creating healthy and acoustically balanced sonic environments.
Arts & Climate Change
We are living in a world reaching a critical point where the equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve this lifestyle and the interconnected economies could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to a complete new reality where unbalance would be the rule and human beings would need to be as creative as never before to survive. Environmental problems, economic uncertainty and political complexity have been around for a long time. What was different before was the speed and depth of transformations compared with today’s sudden changes. The frequent occurrence and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us is increasing, and the ability of human beings on modifying adjacent surroundings as well as distant places have turn into a power capable of altering the planet. Have electronic art a role in all this? Have electronic artists a responsibility in this context? Aiming to use electronic art as a catalyst with the intent of engendering a deeper awareness and creating lasting intellectual working partnerships in solving our global environmental crisis, three robust initiatives were launched: Balance-Unbalance, ‘art! ⋈climate’ (with the Red Cross Climate Centre) and EChO.
