Programme

In Pursuit of Sound: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Faculty of English

University of Cambridge

1-2 October 2019

Schedule

9.00 – 9.30 Registration, coffee and welcome

9.30 – 11.00 Panel 1 – Acoustic Curation

11.00 – 11.30 Coffee 

11.30  – 13.00 Panel 2 – Sound: Lost and Found

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.30 Keynote – Mina Gorji (University of Cambridge)

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee

16.00 – 17.30 Panel 3 – Sound off the Page

18.00 Dinner for Speakers

20.00 Keynote – Tom Lane (Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio)

2 Oct

9.00 – 9.30 Coffee

9.30 – 11.00 Panel 4 – Sounding the Non-Human

11.00 – 11.30 Coffee 

11.30  – 13.00 Panel 5 – Contested Soundscapes 

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.30 Keynote  – Tom Rice (University of Exeter)

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee

16.00 – 17.30 Panel 6 – Silence and the Eerie

17.30 – 18.00 Closing remarks 

Panels

Sound: Lost and Found

  1. ‘If the dead ones could talk …’: War, Ventriloquism and the Body in John van Druten’s 1934 Flowers of the Forest – Marta Donati
  2. Sound, Segregation and Identity Formation: deaf responses to ‘talkie’ cinema – Rachel Garratt
  3. The Beauty in the Banal: Sound-Hunting and Creative Listening in France and the UK, 1948-1978 – Jean-Baptiste Masson

Contested Soundscapes 

  1. The Imperial Recording Era, or the Phonographic Conquest of Africa – Renée Altergott
  2. A Radio That Spoke to the Body: The Insurgent Voices of Radio Alice – Damien Pollard
  3. Listening Through and Beyond Acoustic Trauma – Ege Akdemir
  4. Sounding the City: Tehran’s Contemporary Soundscapes – Laudan Nooshin

Sounding the Non-Human 

  1. Lyric Nightingales and their Acoustic Enclosures, from Ovid to T.S. Eliot – Hunter Dukes
  2. Nature’s song remains the same: animal sound, text and perception in ancient Latin literature – Rodney Cross
  3. Speaking With an Oceanic Body: vocal currents in Tina Keane’s A Shadow of a Journey (1979) – Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell

Sound off the Page

  1. ‘Before the land was subdued’: Sound as Raw Material in Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract – Lily Ní Dhomhnaill
  2. ‘Hearing and Sounding Voices: In the “silence of ink and paper”’(Mills, 2009) – Deirdre Osborne
  3. Sounds of the Limit and their Creative Potential – Adam Potts

Acoustic Curation

  1. Curious taxonomies of timbre: 18th-century German-language texts on the classification of musical sounds – Benjamin Errington
  2. Voiceover Takeover – Sarah Hayden
  3. Choral Architecture: Derrida and the Parc de la Villette – Macs Smith
  4. Curated Soundscapes or Isolated Soundscapes? Personal Media Players And The Acoustic Creation Of Social Imagination In The Québecois Coming-Of-Age Film- Claire Gray

Silence and the Eerie 

  1. Silence as Survival in Wordless Videogames: a close reading of the soundscape in Playdead’s Inside – Emma Raey
  2. Phantacusis: Implied Sound in Silent Cinema – Jacob Browne
  3. “Ventriloquial Terrorism in 1932”: An East End London Estate Agent’s Auditory Experiences in ‘Crook Frightfulness’ – Daniel Wilson

Please note, changes to this programme are possible.