In this blog, I’ll be reflecting on the assessment for this module and the first lesson of said module.
The first paragraph of the brief states, “This unit develops critical awareness of the primary themes which emerge from sound art and global sonic culture in the 21st century by focusing on the creation of an audio paper, introducing a practice-based route towards the third-year research project as an alternative to the traditional written dissertation format.”
In my first year, the most interesting thing about the course was learning about the audio paper alternative to the written dissertation in the third year. It makes sense to have an auditory format for the dissertation in a sound arts course and I’ve had many ideas for it over the past year; however, I still don’t actually know what it is.
To start/complete this assignment I have three questions to answer:
- What is an Audio Paper?
- What topic or statement do I want to base the paper on?
- What will the audio paper sound like?
So, what is an audio paper? My initial suspicion of what it is (based on the brief) is a literal 1-to-1 recreation of a written dissertation in an auditory format. Thinking more about that, I’ve realised that my inference doesn’t make sense.
In our first lesson on the topic, I personally don’t think that it was made any clearer. We were shown soundscapes, electroacoustic music, memes, live performances and sonic journalism. This confusion on what an audio paper is is also shown on the slide where the class chipped in to answer the question “What is Sound Studies?”. There were so many different answers that are all valid in their own way because the subject of the question is too ambiguous to properly define.
Of course “Sound Studies” has a definition that has substance, but the same cannot be said for the audio paper. The audio paper is still being defined and is slowly being defined by things that call themselves audio papers. This leads to the obvious problem that as long as something is in a WAV or MP3 format, it can call itself an audio paper.
There is one last link on the first week moodle, which is the Audio Papers – a manifesto article by Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson on the Seismograf website. While there is a lot to unpack in the article, it would be more prudent to talk more about this topic later as after looking at the content in this module, a reflection of that manifesto comes up in a later week.
While I do still wonder what an audio paper isn’t, as apparently, it can be practically anything one would do on a sound arts course, it is exciting to be one of the people who gets to dictate what an audio paper is on this course (kind of like how case law works in law). I still have my other two questions to answer but I’ll talk more about them in later blog posts.