The Sonic Persona. An Anthropology of Sound
Book Presentation with Holger Schulze and Tobi Müller
Author Holger Schulze in conversation with Tobi Müller
In The Sonic Persona, Holger Schulze undertakes a critical study of some of the most influential studies in sound since the 19th century in the natural sciences, the engineering sciences, and in media theory, confronting them with contemporary artistic practices, with experimental critique, and with disturbing sonic experiences.
From Hermann von Helmholtz to Miley Cyrus, from FLUXUS to the Arab Spring, from Wavefield Synthesis to otoacoustic emissions, from premillennial clubculture to postdemocratic authoritarianism, from signal processing to human echolocation: This book presents a fundamental critique concerning recent sound theories and their anthropological concepts – and proposes an alternate, a more plastic, a visceral framework for research in the field of a cultural anthropology of sounding and listening.
This anthropology of sound takes its readers and listeners on a research expedition to the multitude of alien humanoids and their surprising sonic personae: in dynamic and generative tension between predetermined auditory dispositives, miniscule and not seldomly ignored sound practices, and idiosyncratic sensory corpuses: a critique of the senses.
I’m going to prove the impossible really exists.
Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He serves as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and as founding editor of the book series Sound Studies.
His research focus is the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He was invited visiting professor at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, at the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is associated investigator at the cluster of excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and vice chair of the European Sound Studies Association.
He writes for Merkur, Seismograf, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, freitag, Positionen, TEXTE ZUR KUNST. Selected publications: Sound Studies (2008, ed.), Intimität und Medialität (2012), Gespür (2014), Sound as Popular Culture (2016, ed.), The Sonic Persona (2018)
http://www.soundstudieslab.org
