Sonic Spectral Summoning

TY - JOUR

T1 - Sonic Spectral Summoning

AU - Linsley, Johanna

PY - 2024/5/10

Y1 - 2024/5/10

N2 - Sonic Spectral Summoning was a participatory ‘correspondence course’ that took place as part of Queer Extension, a series of remote, artist-led experiments in alternative education that ran during the spring 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. The project was structured as a kind of game that set a series of imaginative provocations all based on the idea that some arrangement of sound might give access to secret knowledge related to the persistence of the dead among the living (ghosts). Sonic Spectral Summoning is also the title of an audio work for voice and occasional electronic sound that the author made in response. This account traces some coordinates of the project, across fiction, domesticity, structures for collective practice and the unknown. The project, and this account, contributes to a field of inquiry about sonic epistemologies that is concerned not just with producing knowledge with and through sound, but with using sound to re-configure what constitutes knowledge. If ‘hear-telling’ designates a space for utterance, discourse, theatrical representation, sonic attention, infrastructures for communication and miscommunication, and other verbal transmissions, Sonic Spectral Summoning tries to linger in that space, shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others.

AB - Sonic Spectral Summoning was a participatory ‘correspondence course’ that took place as part of Queer Extension, a series of remote, artist-led experiments in alternative education that ran during the spring 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. The project was structured as a kind of game that set a series of imaginative provocations all based on the idea that some arrangement of sound might give access to secret knowledge related to the persistence of the dead among the living (ghosts). Sonic Spectral Summoning is also the title of an audio work for voice and occasional electronic sound that the author made in response. This account traces some coordinates of the project, across fiction, domesticity, structures for collective practice and the unknown. The project, and this account, contributes to a field of inquiry about sonic epistemologies that is concerned not just with producing knowledge with and through sound, but with using sound to re-configure what constitutes knowledge. If ‘hear-telling’ designates a space for utterance, discourse, theatrical representation, sonic attention, infrastructures for communication and miscommunication, and other verbal transmissions, Sonic Spectral Summoning tries to linger in that space, shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others.

KW - Sound studies

KW - domesticity

KW - ghosts

KW - practice-based research

KW - queer

KW - spectres

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85192808083

U2 - 10.1080/10486801.2024.2305435

DO - 10.1080/10486801.2024.2305435

M3 - Article

SN - 1048-6801

VL - 33

SP - 421

EP - 433

JO - Contemporary Theatre Review

JF - Contemporary Theatre Review

IS - 4

ER -