This blog will be about a bit of what was said during the book presentations and a bit of debating ideas that came up frequently.
Personally, the presentation I found the most interesting was the last one on the book “The Fundamentals of Sonic Art & Sound Design”. This was mainly because the 2 people who gave the presentation were funny which made the amount of information that they were giving easily digestible. That book also mentioned quite a bit on coding and such, which is a field I’m quite interested in (as is evident in the blog post in which some background research for my assessment is featured).
It was mentioned that sound arts are usually relegated to a subordinate role when it comes to multi-media pieces and that the book was trying to highlight times where sound art acted as the “main actor” in multi-media pieces. As someone who taught as a fine artist for most of his life and has a great interest in film and performance, trying to navigate how to make sound the focus in my multi-media pieces has been a hard one. Personally, I’ve always thought that art shouldn’t be experienced in only one dimension or only through one sense as humans don’t experience life through one sense or in one dimension. This statement was really usually for me to hear at the time because it did cause changes in how I perceived my sonic thinking and doing assessment.
Other than the fact that all the books were written with as much jargon as one could fit, something else that came up constantly was eurocentrism and how it was perceived, in itself, to be a bad thing. Why is it wrong for Europeans to make eurocentric literature? How can we diminish their experiences just because other cultures are not properly represented? The problem with any centrism is when it replaces other centrism (other than the fact that it’s not a holistic view of whatever it’s trying to talk about), not the act of being centric in the first place. In fact, I would argue that centrism existing is the reason we can talk about different cultures having different viewpoints on sound art, making it actually a good thing. What I find very interesting is how we can complain when a text is eurocentric, in terms of history and views, yet it’s actually the most relevant viewpoint to those who are European as it is our history, the foundation on which European sound arts sit upon. Just because there are bad parts with the fact that the European standpoint is what is taught in other continents (this is technically an assumption), one what be quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.