Editorial: Socially engaged sound practices, part 2

Abstract

The first special issue on socially engaged sound practices (Organised Sound 26/2) contributed to this growing area of research in distinct ways. It featured scholarly accounts by those doing socially engaged sound practices, with such accounts moving towards more inherently (self-)critical sound practices and study of such works. It included a diversity in interpretations of ‘sociality’, addressing distinct areas and eras of sound practices when doing so. The articles diversify the conversation on the topic by decentralising theoretical approaches to the subject matter and by including a wider variety of voices, experiences, sounding bodies and attitudes to listening. Together, the issue looked to move the conversation beyond dominant hierarchies and towards greater inclusivity, intersectionality, decolonisation and into the morethan-human register – all through creative sonic forms, at a scale larger than the individual. This second issue builds and expands upon this work, as well as moving into several further key areas. There is a certain emphasis by authors here on overcoming the unhelpful binaries of professional/nonprofessional (or ‘amateur’) regarding participation in collaborative sound arts practices, and in relation to non-hierarchical educational approaches. Other articles dig further into collective listener engagement and audience reception of (participative) work, and present theoretical standpoints that move beyond a music/sound art divide. Artist-authors and practiceresearchers describe bespoke sociotechnological applications and advances in distributed online approaches. It is also perhaps notable for the number of papers with three or more authors, and with more than half the issue written collaboratively. This, of course, returns to the overarching themes linking issues 26/2 and 28/1 overall – the social, engagement, collaboration in sound, and of listening to and resonating with ideas and sonic experiences beyond one’s own positionality. Erik Deluca and Elana Hausknecht approach socially engaged sound arts practices with open questions of authorship, identity, representation and remediation through a mixture of analytical and theoretical approaches. They draw on work by similarly socially engaged educator-facilitators Pauline Oliveros and Paulo Freire, whose ideas frame accounts of the authors’ own work and experiences. These auto-ethnographic accounts become an invitation for readers to consider the enactment of sound art as an open-ended dialogic event – an interweaving of sound, listening and learning – and further, to ‘witness some possibilities of dialogue in-process’ with critical consciousness. Vadim Keylin also explores the creative agency of participatory sound art works. Through two ethnographic case studies, his article examines the facilitation and execution of participants’ creativity, questioning how this intersects with the proposing artist’s agency and the work’s materiality. In dissociating sound-making from music, the author observes that participatory sound art ‘liberates its audiences from the culturally entrenched protocols of aesthetic judgement, revealing its underlying ableism and exclusivism’. Distinct opportunities to participate through vocalising offered in the case studies are found to allow ‘horizontal and altruistic ways of exercising creativity, beyond the egocentrism of self-expression’. Through interviews with ten sound arts practitioners, Nicole Robson, Nick Bryan-Kinns and Andrew McPherson dig further into issues surrounding the production and reception of audience engagement with sound arts practices and confront the challenges in understanding and articulating such experience and their effects. The authors look to characterise the process-situated artistic practices as ‘mediatory, in the sense that they act in between site and audience experience and are guided by the nonhuman agencies of settings and material things’. Martin Ullrich and Sebastian Trump provide a theoretical expansion of such a sociality of sound, extending towards non-human animals and posthuman artificial intelligences. Drawing on Haraway and Latour, their theoretical considerations aim to be a departure point for an ‘increasingly interdisciplinary assessment of more-than-human actors in socially engaged sound practices’. The authors argue that the creative agency of non-human actors in sonic collaborations through concepts of pluralistic coevolutionary principles ‘can enrich the development of evolutionary algorithms and contribute to more diverse and more complex social interactions’. Simon Fox’s article also expands the notion of collaboration beyond other humans to include materials, ideas and both nonand post-human entities. His manifesto for the ‘New Amateur’ draws on anarchist