Holly Rogers
https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/HollyRogers
https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/HollyRogers
Holly Rogers is reader in music at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She is interested in experimental audiovisual culture, from video art and avant-garde film to new and interactive media. Holly is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford University Press, 2013), co-author of the textbook Twentieth-Century Musics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (Routledge, 2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is also a founding editor for the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media and the Goldsmiths journal Sonic Scope. |
Quarantined Listening: The Cyber Remediation of City Soundscapes during Lockdown
Today we are listening harder than ever. But to what? Social distancing and isolation have reduced the noise of everyday life. As cities retreat indoors and transport comes to a standstill, the world has become a quieter place. But while a hush has settled over the outside world, our virtual spaces have exploded into a cacophony of communal and participatory noisemaking. This talk will explore the ways in which the sounds of quarantine have been circulated and used creatively online by musicians eager to understand and engage with recent events.
As the world retreats indoors during Covid-19, cyberculture has become a significant tool for creative expression, collaboration and inclusion. During lockdown, online music has become a vital tool for maintaining and developing community, visible in the numerous clips of apartment block singsongs and singing doctors. While these forms have allowed locked-down residents to join together and to transmit their sonic communality to the world, other forms have embraced the online opportunities for live collaborations—from Lady Gaga’s Together at Home concert to the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th —and pedagogy—with many university music classes moving online and opening access to the public. Other musical opportunities have seen a relay of sonic re-imaginings from remediations in the form of parody songs (like Chris Mann’s “Hello (From the Inside)”), to remixable content found on TikTok and Instagram’s “pass-it-on” covers game. Such collaborative events have harnessed the participatory potential of cybermedia to create and develop new forms of communal musicmaking and expression.
In this talk, I focus on online events that have embraced the new sonic ambiences of quarantine. Although there have been examples of musical produsage and democratised creativity in the past, the current pandemic has given sonic experimentation a peculiar resonance. Electronic musicians Matmos, for example, have asked people from all over the world to record their “ambient sounds of isolation” to be used as compositional material for a new work. Such crowd-sourced soundscapes enable cybercommunities to bridge geographical and cultural distances through distributed creativity. This process—which I call sonic elongation—allows participants to not only document our current sonic landscapes, but also to use cyberspace to imagine ways in which they can be shared, challenged and interpreted. The result is a simultaneous snapshot and remediation of our current auditory worlds. Here, such creative resoundings of our quarantined lives will be used to explore the possibilities of online creativity and its increasing entanglement with real-life.
As the world retreats indoors during Covid-19, cyberculture has become a significant tool for creative expression, collaboration and inclusion. During lockdown, online music has become a vital tool for maintaining and developing community, visible in the numerous clips of apartment block singsongs and singing doctors. While these forms have allowed locked-down residents to join together and to transmit their sonic communality to the world, other forms have embraced the online opportunities for live collaborations—from Lady Gaga’s Together at Home concert to the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th —and pedagogy—with many university music classes moving online and opening access to the public. Other musical opportunities have seen a relay of sonic re-imaginings from remediations in the form of parody songs (like Chris Mann’s “Hello (From the Inside)”), to remixable content found on TikTok and Instagram’s “pass-it-on” covers game. Such collaborative events have harnessed the participatory potential of cybermedia to create and develop new forms of communal musicmaking and expression.
In this talk, I focus on online events that have embraced the new sonic ambiences of quarantine. Although there have been examples of musical produsage and democratised creativity in the past, the current pandemic has given sonic experimentation a peculiar resonance. Electronic musicians Matmos, for example, have asked people from all over the world to record their “ambient sounds of isolation” to be used as compositional material for a new work. Such crowd-sourced soundscapes enable cybercommunities to bridge geographical and cultural distances through distributed creativity. This process—which I call sonic elongation—allows participants to not only document our current sonic landscapes, but also to use cyberspace to imagine ways in which they can be shared, challenged and interpreted. The result is a simultaneous snapshot and remediation of our current auditory worlds. Here, such creative resoundings of our quarantined lives will be used to explore the possibilities of online creativity and its increasing entanglement with real-life.