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Finally, an Academic Journal You Don't Have to Read

Welcome to the sonic scholarship boom.
​Screengrab: ​Paperphone

If the problem is that most academic conferences are just people reading from papers in affectless, academic-y voices, then the solution might just be to give those voices some effects: distortion, reverb, pitch-shifting. Sure, they're scholars, not performers, but all the parts of a performance are already there: the mic, a screen, the audience.

​With the Paperphone, easy, free software for using vocal modulation and sound effects in a live—and specifically academic—setting, anyone can build upon the field work of Dr. T. Pain. Welcome to the sonic scholarship boom.

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Obviously such a dramatic proposal needs the proper venue, which is why the Paperphone was introduced on the website/ sound journal Provoke!, "a home for creative-critical projects by makers, documentary artists, and sound scholars whose work presses at the boundaries of scholarship."

Seriously, you should  ​​check Provoke! out.

"Primarily, we wanted to provide a publication venue for creative sonic scholarship," said Mary Caton Lingold, one of Provoke!'s three-headed editing monster, known collectively as "Soundbox," who have been collaborating together for three years now.

"When it comes to sound studies, there is a lot of great scholarship emerging from traditional venues and even a great academic blog, but we felt that an opportunity to get creative with digital technology as a means for arguing about and through sound was being missed," Lingold told me.

"We're all guilty of clicking the mute button with lightning speed when we land on a site with sounds"

It's worth checking out their website, which at this moment has the Paperphone, as well as other projects ranging from the results of recording studio in the Richmond City jail, to a project on redesigning a pawnshop electric guitar, to a series on "the sonic networks" of 18th century Paris.

It's eclectic, and that's the point. According to Provoke!'s editors, the connection between the "explorations" isn't in the content but rather "an ethos of play, experimentation, and social interaction."

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"One of the things that excited us when we started to think about bringing sound and the digital together for creative scholarship is how many folks are out there trying to do the same thing," Lingold said. "And not just academics! We got a great deal of enthusiasm from documentary artists and there are a lot of makers and designers thinking through similar issues."

Their goal is to create a place to publish creative sonic scholarship. Each project has supplemental material explaining how it was done for anyone interested in doing the same or similar, but most of the projects themselves seem made with the public in mind.

The  ​About page takes a vaguely manifesto-like-turn towards the end: "The editors, known collectively as Soundbox," it reads, "wish to see audio material featured more abundantly and creatively in scholarly settings. At the heart of our collaboration is a bold aspiration to hear sound used as a primary means of knowledge production."

But then maybe there's something revolutionary about using sound as the "primary means of knowledge production." The revolt isn't against any person or group, but the long-standing "seeing is believing" primacy of the eye. It's easy to see just how pervasive this myth is—it's in our metaphors, and has been long enough for even Aristotle to notice.

I asked Lingold if that means Provoke! is in for an uphill battle.

"Yes and no," she said. "The real uphill battle might be getting people to actually take the time to listen to audio. As Whitney likes to point out, in the early days of the internet, websites used a lot of sound through MIDI files. I always think of that banana singing 'peanut butter jelly time!' As tastes evolved, sound gained a reputation for being annoying, intrusive, and unsophisticated in online spaces. Or you might say that as the internet became ubiquitous it needed to be domesticated and disciplined—text continued to dominate. We're all guilty of clicking the mute button with lightning speed when we land on a site with sounds!"

The site itself, though, is only an extension of a tradition that has always been around, if just not at the center of things, and Lingold puts "books, LPs and iPods" in a shared genealogy of innovative technologies.

"Writing has held the throne in most Western intellectual traditions for a long time, but never at the exclusion of auditory culture," Lingold said. "It has always been humming alongside textual and visual media. And I mean that literally—humming along! Just think of all the sounds in our world that we engage with when we read things or look at things. I think of sight and seeing's preeminence as pure myth that says a lot more about the values of folks in power than reality."

So there is something subversive at work here. Keep your ear to the ground.