Sonic Spectral Summoning

Abstract

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.

Keywords::

• Sound studies
• queer
• ghosts
• spectres
• domesticity
• practice-based research

Notes

1. M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2023), 52.

2. For more on the project, titled Stolen Voices, see www.yourstolenvoice.com (accessed July 19, 2023).

3. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 3.

4. Holger Schulze, ‘Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A Heuristic for Sound Studies’ Journal of Sonic Studies 4, no. 4 (2018) www.researchcatalogue.net/view/290688/290689 (accessed July 19, 2023).

5. Eleni Ikoniadou, ‘A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 252–265 (255).

6. Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexciya as Spectre’ in Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, eds. Martin Clark and Alex Farquharson (London: Tate, 2103), 138–146 (138). Quoted in Ikoniadou, ‘Sonic Theory’, 255.

7. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, eds. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 35.

8. Michael Newton, ‘Introduction’ in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories (London: Penguin, 2010), xxvi.

9. Theodor Adorno, ‘Theses Against Occultism’ in Stars Down to Earth (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 173.

10. Eirini Kartsaki, ‘Rehearsals of the Weird: Julia Bardsley Almost the Same (Feral Rehearsals for Violent Acts of Culture)’, Contemporary Theatre Review 30, no. 1 (2020): 67–90 (68).

11. Ernst Fischer, ‘Writing Home: Post-modern melancholia and the Uncanny Space of the Living-Room Theatre’ in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2001), 115–131 (126).

12. In The Beginnings of University English, Alexandra Lawrie notes that ‘The University Extension Movement first emerged as an organised and functional educational scheme in England during the 1870s, with the aim of providing tertiary teaching for those unable to go to university’.

13. For an account from Goat Island about the role of education in their creative work, see http://www.goatislandperformance.org/education.htm (accessed July 19, 2023).

14. For full details about Queer Extension, see www.queerextension.org (accessed July 19, 2023).

15. Queer Extension, ‘Queer Corralling and Comforting: Celebrations and Ceremonies’, https://www.queerextension.org/queer-corralling-and-comforting (accessed July 19, 2023).

16. Algernon Blackwood, The Human Chord (New Delhi: Phrabat Prakashan, 2015). This is a refrain that first appears on page 39.

17. Sylvia Mieszkowski, Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 156.

18. Jonathan Sterne, for instance, critiques an ‘audiovisual litany’ within sound scholarship that opposes sight and hearing and naturalises cultural understandings of these perceptual faculties. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 15.

19. Stephen Feld, ‘Waterfalls of Song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’ in Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.

20. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010).

21. Nina Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 3.

22. Deborah Kapchan, ‘The Splash of Icarus: Theorizing Sound Writing’ in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 1–22 (1).

23. Ibid.

24. Rebecca Collins, ‘Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty: Creative Practice and Sonic Detection as Strategies for Scientific Outreach (P4UU)’ funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Grant ID 1897 (2023) https://projects.ift.uam-csic.es/p4uu/ (accessed July 19, 2023).

25. Ikoniadou, ‘Sonic Theory’, 252.

26. Ibid., 262.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 258.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johanna Linsley

Johanna Linsley is an artist and researcher working across performance, text, and sound. She has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Cultural Geographies. Her first album, Stolen Voices 001, was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music in 2021, and her book Sonic Detection is forthcoming from punctum press. Johanna is a lecturer at the University of Dundee.