Este trabalho tem como objetivo principal posicionar o conceito de desenho de escuta. Para tal, articula-se uma composição teórica situada na convergência entre estudos do som, etnografia de mídias, pesquisa em criação artística, e filosofias críticas da representação. Neste início de século XXI, a escuta é empregada explicitamente como um bem material e imaterial distribuído entre mercantilização de audiências, pesquisa em arte e debate ético. Para situar a noção de desenho de escuta como um operador conceitual que responde a este contexto, o trabalho divide-se em duas grandes partes: a primeira parte posiciona o problema geral da tese mediante a descrição de dispositivos de poder que formam políticas majoritárias da auralidade; a segunda parte desdobra o conceito de desenho de escuta como um operador e um designador de variações do agenciamento aural. Na primeira parte, descreve-se uma variedade de situações materiais de consumo de áudio no contexto do complexo militar-entretenimento, particularmente no ambiente de consumo fonográfico online. Neste contexto, analisa-se um dispositivo paradigmático de racionalização instrumental da escuta, e apresenta-se a necessidade teórica de se pensar uma áudio virologia. Na segunda parte, aprecia-se uma transformação epistêmica em curso no âmbito da pesquisa em música no Brasil; e descreve-se a noção de otografia, núcleo conceitual da produção artística que desenvolvi ao longo desta pesquisa de doutorado. A metodologia analítica permite constatar, na primeira parte, a transição de um regime de regulação moral da escuta musical baseado na disciplina para um regime baseado no controle; Na segunda parte, o assunto principal é uma diversidade de pesquisas artísticas que ativam o particular e o local como dimensões a serem recontextualizadas no âmbito da pesquisa em arte. O pressuposto básico desta tese é o de que a escuta é uma prática a ser pensada primordialmente em termos de agenciamento de desejo. Tal pressuposto conduz o trabalho a eleger a esquizoanálise como o seu principal aliado teórico, o que lhe permite esquivar-se de uma série de binarismos usualmente pressupostos pela discursividade acadêmica, tais como natureza e cultura, local e global, musical e extramusical. O desenho de escuta é necessariamente uma prática e um conceito: uma prática de consolidação de territórios existenciais específicos em função dos meios materiais agenciados; e um operador de linguagem, mediante o qual se pode elaborar um saber enunciado a partir do corpo, de ações particularmente significativas, de devires. / This thesis aims to position the concept of listening design. For this, it articulates a theoretical composition situated in the convergence between sound studies, media ethnography, practice-based research, and philosophies critical to representation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, listening is explicitly used as a material and immaterial good distributed among audience commoditification, art and ethical debate. In order to situate the notion of listening design as a conceptual operator responding to this context, this work is divided into two main parts: the first part poses the general problem of the thesis by describing a set of power apparatuses that form majoritary policies of aurality; the second part unfolds the concept of listening design as both an operator and designator for practices transforming aural assemblages. In the first part, I describe a variety of material situations of audio consumption in the context of the military-entertainment complex, mainly the environment of online audio consumption. In this context, I analyze a paradigmatic apparatus for instrumental rationalization of the listening activity, and I assess the theoretical need to think in terms of an audio virology. In the second part, I discuss an ongoing epistemic transformation in the field of music research in Brazil; followed by a description of notion of otography, which is the conceptual nucleus of the artistic production that I developed throughout this doctoral research. The analytical methodology carried out here allows us to verify, in the first part, the transition from an economic-political regime of musical listening based on the discipline to a regime of regulation based on control; In the second part, the focus is on instances of artistic research that activates the particular and the local as dimensions to be recontextualized in the scope of academic art research. The core of this thesis is based on the argument that listening is a practice to be thought primarily in terms of assemblage of desire. This presupposition leads the work to take schizoanalysis as its main theoretical ally, which allows it to dodge a series of binarisms usually presupposed by academic discursiveness, such as nature and culture, local and global, musical and extramusical. Listening design is necessarily a practice and a concept: a practice of consolidation of specific existential territories in function of assembled material media; and a language operator through which one can elaborate a particular knowledge enunciated from the body, from particularly meaningful actions, from becomings.

“An Omnivorous Ear - The Creative Practice of Field Recording” offers new insights into the history of recording outside of the studio in North America, challenging the various working definitions of field recording in music studies, anthropology, and communications. I examine recording methodologies through the late 19th and 20th centuries as a documentary technique, a tool for composition, and an art object in the United States of America and Canada from the late 19th century to the present day. Within this geographical region, I focus on the invention of acoustic recording, the proliferation of the technology amongst the public, folkloric recording supported by governmental and academic institutions, as well a experimental artistic practices. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that ‘the field’ is a social construction mediated by the recordist and recorder. Chapter 2 focuses on how cultures translate collective and phenomenological experiences into histories through sound media. These include orality, writing, the inscription of sound waves onto media, acoustic recording, and radio as forms of sound media that each embodies distinct forms of social and political knowledge. Chapter 3 details the development of recording machines and their effect on listening practices. Chapter 4 locates practitioners of phonography within the development of portable recording equipment on the one hand and the ‘hi-fi’ cultural movement in North America on the other. Practitioners included folklorists Alan Lomax from the Library of Congress, Moses Asch of Folkways Records, and Harry Smith, creator of the Anthology of American Folk Music; Stefan Kudelski, creator of the NAGRA recorder; and media maker Tony Schwartz, among the first to create the sound documentary by editing field recordings. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between sound, music and the environment within the paradigm of the soundscape as theorized by the World Soundscape Project (WSP). I critique the research and compositional practices developed by WSP members, and the influence it has on ecomusicology and sound art. Chapter 6 outlines sonic ethnography, a methodology that borrows from the best practices of many of the individuals mentioned throughout the dissertation, and employs new compositional techniques to condense and manipulate social, political and historical narratives through sonic works. The dissertation concludes by arguing that field recording, can be used to critique aesthetic and cultural dilemmas of representation.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo principal posicionar o conceito de desenho de escuta. Para tal, articula-se uma composição teórica situada na convergência entre estudos do som, etnografia de mídias, pesquisa em criação artística, e filosofias críticas da representação. Neste início de século XXI, a escuta é empregada explicitamente como um bem material e imaterial distribuído entre mercantilização de audiências, pesquisa em arte e debate ético. Para situar a noção de desenho de escuta como um operador conceitual que responde a este contexto, o trabalho divide-se em duas grandes partes: a primeira parte posiciona o problema geral da tese mediante a descrição de dispositivos de poder que formam políticas majoritárias da auralidade; a segunda parte desdobra o conceito de desenho de escuta como um operador e um designador de variações do agenciamento aural. Na primeira parte, descreve-se uma variedade de situações materiais de consumo de áudio no contexto do complexo militar-entretenimento, particularmente no ambiente de consumo fonográfico online. Neste contexto, analisa-se um dispositivo paradigmático de racionalização instrumental da escuta, e apresenta-se a necessidade teórica de se pensar uma áudio virologia. Na segunda parte, aprecia-se uma transformação epistêmica em curso no âmbito da pesquisa em música no Brasil; e descreve-se a noção de otografia, núcleo conceitual da produção artística que desenvolvi ao longo desta pesquisa de doutorado. A metodologia analítica permite constatar, na primeira parte, a transição de um regime de regulação moral da escuta musical baseado na disciplina para um regime baseado no controle; Na segunda parte, o assunto principal é uma diversidade de pesquisas artísticas que ativam o particular e o local como dimensões a serem recontextualizadas no âmbito da pesquisa em arte. O pressuposto básico desta tese é o de que a escuta é uma prática a ser pensada primordialmente em termos de agenciamento de desejo. Tal pressuposto conduz o trabalho a eleger a esquizoanálise como o seu principal aliado teórico, o que lhe permite esquivar-se de uma série de binarismos usualmente pressupostos pela discursividade acadêmica, tais como natureza e cultura, local e global, musical e extramusical. O desenho de escuta é necessariamente uma prática e um conceito: uma prática de consolidação de territórios existenciais específicos em função dos meios materiais agenciados; e um operador de linguagem, mediante o qual se pode elaborar um saber enunciado a partir do corpo, de ações particularmente significativas, de devires. / This thesis aims to position the concept of listening design. For this, it articulates a theoretical composition situated in the convergence between sound studies, media ethnography, practice-based research, and philosophies critical to representation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, listening is explicitly used as a material and immaterial good distributed among audience commoditification, art and ethical debate. In order to situate the notion of listening design as a conceptual operator responding to this context, this work is divided into two main parts: the first part poses the general problem of the thesis by describing a set of power apparatuses that form majoritary policies of aurality; the second part unfolds the concept of listening design as both an operator and designator for practices transforming aural assemblages. In the first part, I describe a variety of material situations of audio consumption in the context of the military-entertainment complex, mainly the environment of online audio consumption. In this context, I analyze a paradigmatic apparatus for instrumental rationalization of the listening activity, and I assess the theoretical need to think in terms of an audio virology. In the second part, I discuss an ongoing epistemic transformation in the field of music research in Brazil; followed by a description of notion of otography, which is the conceptual nucleus of the artistic production that I developed throughout this doctoral research. The analytical methodology carried out here allows us to verify, in the first part, the transition from an economic-political regime of musical listening based on the discipline to a regime of regulation based on control; In the second part, the focus is on instances of artistic research that activates the particular and the local as dimensions to be recontextualized in the scope of academic art research. The core of this thesis is based on the argument that listening is a practice to be thought primarily in terms of assemblage of desire. This presupposition leads the work to take schizoanalysis as its main theoretical ally, which allows it to dodge a series of binarisms usually presupposed by academic discursiveness, such as nature and culture, local and global, musical and extramusical. Listening design is necessarily a practice and a concept: a practice of consolidation of specific existential territories in function of assembled material media; and a language operator through which one can elaborate a particular knowledge enunciated from the body, from particularly meaningful actions, from becomings.

My dissertation, The Endless Roar in which We Live: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Fiction is the first extended study that locates an intersection between sound studies and literary studies in order to examine noise as it defines spaces and places, and the characters that live and work in them, in American literature from the second half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century. I evaluate noise in a sampling of American fiction, and consider how the imagined sounds of fiction echo nineteenth-century soundscapes and underscore contemporary discernment of noises – and sometimes the lack of noises – in the national consciousness. I consider the street noise that the upper classes wished away, the factory noise that so many women workers spent a lifetime hearing, and the resounding noise of the United States’ expansion westward. Conversely, I also consider how authors and characters respond to the noises that penetrate their ears and create their soundscapes. Together, these considerations shape my argument that sounds help to construct and characterize localities, just as certain places construct particular sounds. Moreover, however, I argue that noise creates spaces wherein identities – such as those of gender, class, and ethnicity – also often tied to place, are discovered, defined, and challenged. In many ways, classifications of noise are subjective and varied, depending on who makes and who hears the noise, where and why the noise is produced, and how and by whom is the noise interpreted. Considering noise as malleable and interpretable based on context allows me to most effectively examine noise as a facilitator of identity formation.

<p>"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that began in Los Angeles, California in 1906 to argue that the aesthetic practices are the condition of possibility for a performative assessment and antiphonal criticism of normative theology and philosophy. Indeed, the history of these performances is an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the grain of liberal logics of subjectivity. By showing that theology and philosophy were abstractions of thought that produced the conceptual body as the target of racialization, the atheological-aphilosophical couplet indexes modes of intellectual practice that engulf and exceed such reductivism. BlackPentecostalism is a social, musical, intellectual form of new life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing new beginnings. The religious practices I analyze produce a range of common sensual experiences: of "shouting" as dance; "testimony" and "tarry service" as song and praise noise; "whooping" (ecstatic, eclipsed breath) that occurs in praying and preaching; as well as, finally, "speaking in tongues." I ultimately argue that these aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture. </p><p>During the antebellum era, both clergy and scholars alike levied incessant injunctions against loud singing and frenzied dancing in religion and popular culture. Calling for the relinquishment of these sensual spiritual experiences, I argue that these framing injunctions led to a condition where BlackPentecostal aesthetics, even in the much later institutional Black Studies, were and are thought as excessive performances. "Black Sacred Breath" investigates how discourses that emerged within the cauldron of spatiotemporal triangular trades in coffee, tea, sugar and human flesh of Transatlantic slavery necessitated a theology and philosophy of race, and consequently, the racializing of aesthetic practices. Over and against this discursive theology-philosophy were the performance practices of BlackPentecostalism, an atheology-aphilosophy. These sensual experiences were not merely performed through duress but were the instantiation and sign of love, of life. As love and life, these performative dances, songs, noises and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire and joy are important for the historicity - the theory of history found in these practices - that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness. Fundamentally, "Black Sacred Breath" is about the possibility for Black Study (as opposed to and differentiated from university institutional Black Studies), about the capacity for aesthetic practices typically deemed excessive can be constitutive, can provide new models for collective intellectual practice.</p> / Dissertation

<p>At the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s. </p><p>Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation considers the intersection of aurality and visuality in seventeenth-century New Spanish poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s (1648/1651-95) acoustico-poetic discourse. Prior scholarship has focused either on the author’s engagement with Western music theory and compositional practices or else the role of musical references in her works. This has resulted in the marginalization of Sor Juana’s engagement with sound through disciplines that are not strictly musical or poetic, including: acoustics, cognitive theory and visual art. I address these lacunae by considering such concepts as echo, reflection, Ear, Voice, musica poetica (links between music and rhetoric) and musical pathos within the poet’s canon. Throughout my readings, Athanasius Kircher’s encyclopedic musical treatises— Musurgia universalis (1650) and Phonurgia nova (1673), both of which circulated within New Spain during Sor Juana’s lifetime—stand out as important sources by which such ideas were transmitted. My approach sharpens extant scholarship on these topics and identifies two new influences within Sor Juana’s poetic world: Aristotelian theories of cognition and Kircher’s unique position on musica poetica. More generally, this dissertation engages emerging scholarship on Ear in the early modern world and thus responds to the critical limits of ocularcentrism.

The soundscape plays a key, if often overlooked, role in the construction of public urban space. Street music – a conscious deliberate propagation of sound in public space – opens an entryway into comprehending the role of sound in the city, and what it reveals about the city’s inhabitants. Ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels and Stockholm focuses on street musicians of all kinds, exploring how their music is shaped by their personal motivations, how their practices negotiate meaning in sound and in space, and how their rhythms shape, and are shaped by, the city. These explorations give reason to question R. Murray Schafer’s philosophies on soundscape studies, particularly in the urban context. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s notions of the production of space, and rhythmanalysis as an analytical tool, the urban soundscape is understood as an ongoing negotiation of individual actions, where dynamics of power, identity, and ideology become audible. Street musicians and their sound cultures feature not just as a topic worthy of study, but also as a guide of how and why to listen to and analyze the rhythms of the city.

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's EDM-pop productions for "Chandelier." Treated as case studies, these songs and artists exemplify body-subject impressionability, political disaffection from historically dominant forms of whitened, hetero-patriarchal, liberalized ideology, and the performative possibilities of crossing and crowding subject-hood through persona crafting. Following these case studies, the project concludes by offering conceptual im/possibilities and pedagogical materials for rhetorically teaching composition as a sonic art. The fifth and final chapter conceptually intervenes in rhetoric and composition's pedagogical tendencies toward elevating and espousing notions of the minimally affected, individual, authorial, agentive rhetor/writer by developing a series of activities designed to give instructional supports for scaffolding student learning and composing specific to vocalic sound and the sorts of affects engendered in listening.

This dissertation examines the creative work of harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, pianist Glenn Gould, and singer/songwriter Sting to address aesthetic and revivalist notions of early-music performance practice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I accomplish this by viewing their early-music recordings through two different but interrelated lenses: sound and otherness. By closely comparing Landowska's performances to those of Gould not just in terms of choice of instruments but, more importantly, of rhythmic projection, structural articulation, and other fundamental musical choices, a definable early-music "sound" emerges that transcends the movement’s traditional borders. Early music becomes a sonically identifiable phenomenon transmitted by performers of various training, affiliations, and epochs, rather than a loosely connected politicized movement precariously perched on claims of historical (authenticity) and timbrel (period instruments) grounds. I further illuminate this sound within the context of a performed "exoticism," signified by exotic instruments, style, and attitude. In these terms, I focus on Landowska's reception in the early twentieth century, comparing it to the reception of Gould's individualized twentieth-century Bach recordings and, as a twenty-first century venture into early music, the reception of Sting's 2006 recording of Elizabethan lute songs by John Dowland. By repositioning "Early" as "Other," a more relevant framework emerges for discussing how early-music performances over time construct and reflect a sense of authenticity in the movement and, conversely, how that construct affects its performers and its public.