BOOKS
Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity. Ed.by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Duke University Press, 2016.
The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occurs within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation not only provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities—it offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies
The Art of Immersive Soundscapes. Ed. by Pauline Minevich and Ellen Waterman; DVD curated by James Harley. University of Regina Press, 2013. http://www.uofrpress.ca/publications/Art-of-Immersive-Soundscapes
The Art of Immersive Soundscapes explores a variety of contemporary sound art practices with an environmental emphasis that foregrounds the social life of sounds. From the bells of Venice to the beeping of heart monitors in a cardiac unit, from the sonification of climate change data to intimate fantasies in private rooms, immersive soundscapes create evocative atmospheres that play across space, place, time, memory, embodiment, and imagination. Scholarly essays and artist statements explore diverse perspectives from soundscape composition and performance, sound installation, new media, festival curation, sound art histories, and sound recording and diffusion. The accompanying DVD in 5.1 surround sound includes audio and visual works by the artists represented in the book, situating pioneering Canadian soundscape composers within an international field.
Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered. Editor and Introduction. Peterborough: Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies; and Manotick: Penumbra Press, 2002.http://www.penumbrapress.ca/book.php?id=225
From Japanese ritual to Polish history to Canadian soundscape composition, this collection maps the fascinating relationship between environmental sound and cultural imagination. Over twenty-five years ago, renowned Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer pioneered the study of sound in the environment through his World Soundscape Project. Today, acoustic ecologists are active globally; their concerns range from noise pollution to the preservation of unique sound environments. In Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered, sound artists, designers, and scholars from eight countries offer a wide range of perspectives on the place of sound in our world and on how our place in the world is articulated through sound.
Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered explores a world of sound experiences drawn from everyday life. These evocative essays reflect the passionate concern that acoustic ecologists have for the rich diversity of sonic environments.