Post by Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), a unit of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, will hold its first national conference February 25-27, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

Keynote speakers will include Professor Paddy Scannell of the University of Michigan, a noted radio scholar and historian, and Sam Brylawski, former Head of the LOC’s Recorded Sound Division and a digital recording pioneer.

In 2014, the National Recording Preservation Board recognized the need to address the perilous state of the nation’s radio heritage, which has not received the archival and critical attention of other U.S. media. Over the last two years, the RPTF has coordinated a nation-wide effort to identify major collections of radio recordings and other materials that will help to raise cultural awareness of America’s rich tradition of radio-based soundwork and make it accessible to future generations.

A year and a half later, we have built an organization consisting of more than 130 media studies scholars actively engaged in researching radio’s past and identifying key archival sources; over 350 affiliate archives, collections, and radio producing organizations across the US and Canada; and a growing number of online partners who aid in critical discussion and dissemination of our efforts.

The most recent additions to our group of affiliated organizations include NPR, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, the Paley Center for Media, the Prometheus Radio Project, the Media Ecology Project, the Studs Terkel Archive, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

The Library of Congress Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center located in Culpeper, VA.

Our first national conference, Saving America’s Radio Heritage, will bring these groups together, along with members of the broader academic, archival, media, and general public, to discuss what we have accomplished and plan for future activities. Over three days in February, we will tour the LOC’s Packard Center, meet for a day of panels focused on radio’s history and cultural significance at the LOC’s Madison Building, then move to the University of Maryland’s Center for Mass Media and Culture (formerly the Library of American Broadcasting) for a second day of workshops and caucuses focused on issues of outreach, growth, and education.

The Radio Preservation Task Force curates a regular series for Antenna about radio history and archival issues, which can be accessed here. More information about the RPTF can be found at the organization’s new website. Stay tuned for further news and discussion of the conference and the RPTF’s activities. For additional information about the task force, please contact: radiotaskforce <at> gmail.com. Questions about strategic planning and partnerships can be directed to the RPTF’s National Research Director, Josh Shepperd (Catholic University): shepperd <at> cua.edu.

Post by Josh Shepperd, The Catholic University of America

This post continues Josh Shepperd’s “On (the) Wisconsin Discourses” series from last year. This is Part 1 of 2 in a pair of posts commemorating Michele Hilmes.

Discourses as Political Will

Previous posts in this series have discussed how the “Wisconsin” tradition of media research has been informed by the Birmingham School approach to the problem of “discourse”. In short, “discourse” is a term that serves as a shorthand concept to refer to how embodiments are bound by stable yet flexible identity affiliations that respond to and intervene among social contradictions. The question of “political will” in discursive theory is defined as temporal hegemonic precedents that social ensembles interpret as they circulate representational codes among a “public”. This concept of discourse, which can be roughly approximated as a logic of how superstructural strictures influence social encounters, is usually applied through analysis of “determinants”, the “limits and pressures” faced by cultural blocs during social selectivity. “Selection” is not theorized as an opportune, consumptive, bootstrapping, or commercially based practice, but as adjustments emergent groups make in spite of limited opportunities for identity recognition or class mobility during social engagement. Discursive interactions are further guided by reference to internal histories communicable to other discursive blocs.

As Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, Sara Ahmed, Julie D’Acci, and others have noted, publics carry inherent structural limits for group recognition. Part of the ongoing influence of the Birmingham theory of “discourse”, however, is that it accounts for macro forms of participation without prescribing a mandated mode for public engagement. Discursive theorists instead propose that a public is comprised of diachronically shifting perspectives, oriented toward social reciprocation while advocating for maximal visibility for their positions. Discursive power waxes and wanes, sometimes unpredictably, and even if a bloc has developed a “successful” representational code, this does not guarantee that a specific group will become politically “dominant”. Instead, a group’s communicative codes take on hybrid and homologous meanings and consequent applications in everyday life. Literacy of these codes provides insight into past discursive constructs and might help to anticipate strategies for future advocacy.

Discourse or “Discourse About”?

A crucial distinction often missed by contemporary media and cultural studies research is that distribution apparatuses are not continuing with discursive work merely because they are able to increase visibility by saturating perspective; businesses surely do this, as do consumer responses. The relationship between “mere” circulation and dialectical progress is specious at best. Two variables must be qualified so that discursive analysis might make viable ethical claims. The first variable asks: is a discursive construct a sustainable marker for identity formation, beyond a specific phenomenon studied? This question requires a fine distinction between the concept “discourse” and analysis of the discourse about a specific subject or pattern of behavior. The second variable addresses the contours of reciprocation. Does a “discourse” have the capacity to respond to larger social expediencies through an internally coherent logic, or is it a specific reactionary response to a proffered pleasure?

This second point is especially crucial for cultural work if one believes the Birmingham School maxim that discourses are characterized by their struggle for equitable recognition. Here it’s worth pointing out that distinctions should be made regarding what type of recognition is at stake. Consumer activism, for example, might achieve small gains by influencing representational depiction, but it’s not clear if working within the (very limited) constraints of an industrial interface permits advocating against larger conditions of structural reproduction. Paul Willis notes that many dimensions of resistance implicitly articulate solutions to social contradictions, but without clarifying what solution might be anticipated, actants fall into a simultaneous performance of resistance and dominant ideological reproduction. One’s consumer preferences might take on the simulation of a “discourse”, for example, but consumptive practice does not predicate discursive sustainability, ameliorate social parity, or provide grounds for dissension. Thus according to Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and John Fiske, an innate degree of “drift” media literacy is necessary, so that discursive interventions might calculate public impact beyond colonization of the local by standardized culture.

Discursive Analysis of Residual History

This points to the primacy of the work of Michele Hilmes, the subject of the final piece in this series. Besides serving as a mentor and steward of the Wisconsin tradition since the 1990s, Hilmes has engendered a new tradition by clarifying one of the most difficult problems in discursive analysis – how might we trace ideological reproduction in practice itself, beyond critiquing representations after they’ve already been circulated? The Hilmesian approach might be described as an attempt to identify the causative basis of what we regularly call “residual” messages by looking to genealogies of discursive struggles. By introducing a rigorous historiographical model, Hilmes has founded a tradition concerned with the fundamental cultural studies question of how dialectical relationships between processes might be identified through institutional histories, e.g., “radio and film”, “production and reception”, “U.S. and Britain/transnational institutional approaches”. And she has continued with the Birmingham School project of identifying, examining, and contributing to the “media literacy” of varied “publics” besides the Habermasian political, including (and especially) the reflexive “popular”. She has expanded our evidentiary knowledge of how these varied publics – such as the imagined, discursive, and transnational – have reciprocated with the political.

As Wisconsin network historian Douglas Gomery has eminently argued, economies of scale define the organization of media industries as self-sustaining but holistic structures toward distributive and affective outcomes. Hilmes added an additional historiographical mandate: that scholarship look at the ways that institutions are founded and evolve in relation to each other, deliberately choosing structures of organization novel from other institutions. This method begs a fundamental question: to what do discursive blocs aspire, and how might we assess such aspirations without speculation or by uttering ideologically reproductive claims? Part of the answer, according to a Hilmesian historiography, can be found in understanding how institutions functionalize discursive interests.

In a few weeks, Part 2 of this post will look at the historical dialectics of discursive institutional analysis, as developed by Michele Hilmes.

Post by Bill Kirkpatrick, Denison University

Here’s an under-appreciated fact: Michele Hilmes is a talented singer, as in “sings in public and people want to listen” talented.

I mention that because the many encomia to Hilmes in the wake of her retirement from teaching are likely to focus on her academic accomplishments, so it’s nice to inject some tidbits about the person. But the real reason is because the metaphor of the voice is just too irresistible when discussing the leading figure in Radio Studies of the past two decades: she is someone who gave voice to the discipline, who championed its many voicings. In that way, Hilmes’ voice and legacy resound far beyond her own work, and well beyond Radio Studies itself.

Donald Hambrick and Ming-Jer Chen argue that successful new academic disciplines emerge when scholars build “admittance-seeking social movements.” In contrast to Kuhnian revolutions or divisive confrontations with the disciplinary mainstream, the admittance-seeking movement seeks to carve out a place for new scholarship within an existing area of study. A major part of Hilmes’ importance has been her success in persuading Media and Cultural Studies to recognize the value of Radio Studies and Sound Studies in the face of its original indifference or even resistance.

For an admittance-seeking movement to thrive, say Hambrick and Chen, three elements are needed: differentiation, mobilization, and legitimacy-building. First, “it needs to differentiate itself from other existing fields, making claims about how a class of important problems cannot be solved by these status quo entities.” Hilmes, as a cultural historian who thinks as much about media institutions, economics, and policy as she does about the social, cultural, and political roles of texts, has been able to make a strong case for differentiation, showing her colleagues how the study of radio contributes to important questions in the field.

She makes the case for radio scholarship along multiple axes: the interconnectedness of radio and film, the indebtedness of television practices and texts to radio’s precedents, the centrality of radio to questions of cultural politics and the public sphere, the transmedial problem of sound, and many more. The breadth of her work reflects, first and foremost, an extraordinarily creative mind that can’t help but identify interesting connections; along the way, however, and as a byproduct of that breadth, Hilmes brings radio studies into a range of other conversations, allowing scholars of film, television, policy, gender, nationalism, and many other subjects to see the significance of radio to the questions they are interested in.

Only Connect, Fourth Edition (Cengage Learning, 2013)

The second of Hambrick and Chen’s elements is the mobilization of resources, by which they mean building the infrastructure and social relationships that enable like-minded scholars to find and support each other, define the questions and objects of the field, share their work, and form a disciplinary identity. In this regard, it is no surprise that Hilmes was so drawn to E. M. Forster’s phrase “only connect” that she named a book after it (Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States). She’s a connector of the first order; for example, approaching her at a conference is always tantamount to getting an introduction to someone else in the field.  Among radio scholars, her generous mentoring and tireless encouragement of junior scholars is, without exaggeration, legendary.

But beyond being supportive at an interpersonal level, Hilmes has accomplished a lot of concrete, practical field-building for Radio Studies. Among the initiatives that owe a substantial portion of their success to Michele include the biannual Transnational Radio Conference, Radio Journal, the North American Radio Studies Network, and the expansion of Sound Studies within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). These initiatives brought together radio researchers from around the globe and helped them see themselves engaged in a common scholarly enterprise.

Teaching is equally critical to sustaining a discipline, and Hilmes contributed there, too: recognizing that we needed a textbook that did justice to radio within the history of broadcasting, and that she was in a position to write one, she did. She even deserves credit for some things that I’m happy to put on my own CV, like co-founding the SCMS Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group with Alex Russo: that was basically Michele’s idea. In other words, if Radio Studies is more vibrant than ever, it is because Hilmes, not alone but foremost, has mobilized resources and organized people in order to establish the enabling conditions for the field to emerge and expand.

“In Focus: Sound Studies” from Cinema Journal 48.1, Fall 2008; edited by Michele Hilmes.

Hambrick and Chen’s third element in field-building is: the new discipline must be taken seriously: “[T]he aspiring community must build legitimacy in the eyes of the academic establishment, by intellectual persuasion.” Hilmes’ work speaks for itself, of course, as does the legitimacy of radio scholarship through the Hilmesian work of her graduate students, colleagues, and respected scholars across Media and Cultural Studies. But she has also engaged in more active persuading: by editing an “In Focus” on Sound Studies in Cinema Journal, making the case for Radio Studies in a range of venues as keynote speaker or invited panelist, or simply asking the “What about radio?” question as an audience member at conferences.

If the above reads as overly biographical, so simply overly fannish, I hope it nonetheless also illustrates for scholars in emerging fields what it takes to build and give voice to a discipline. Hilmes’ example shows that great scholarship is important, but it is not enough: new areas of study emerge primarily through the concrete labor, so different from the research we’re trained in, of making the case for new kinds of scholarship and organizing the people and resources to give it wings. Because she has been a great scholar and done that kind of work, Michele Hilmes can be assured that her legacy is not just on the library shelf; it is reflected in the journals, the listservs, the conferences, and above all the people who, collectively, are Radio Studies.

As with its cultural presence, the SCMS program reflects a catholic view of radio. A decade ago, the relatively few radio papers primarily addressed network era radio, the contemporary renaissance in radio scholarship addresses historical work from a variety of periods, transmedia adaptation, contemporary broadcast and satellite-based practices, as well as related practices like podcasts and web-streaming services. Now in its third year, the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group continues to offer community and mentorship for radio studies scholars new to SCMS or to the profession. The following consists of a list of explicitly radio oriented papers, workshops, and presentations. If one has a larger frame, presentations under the rubric of “Sound Studies” can be found in a roundup on the Sound Studies Blog.

Wed, 10:00 A10 Lindsay Affleck “Richard Diamond as Radio Shamus.”

Wed, 4:00 D18 Panel on “Podcasting: A Decade into the Life of a ‘New’ Medium”
Brian Fateaux on “Satellite Radio and the Aesthetics of Podcasting”
Andrews Salvati, “”Historiography and Interactivity in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History”
Kelli Marshal, “Transmedia Storytime with your host Marc Maron”

Thursday, 11:00 G5 Panel on “Intermedial Adaptations of War of the Worlds”
Gabriel Paletz “Book to Broadcast and across Media: Orson Welles’s Strategies of Adaptation”
Doron Galili “War of the Worlds, Mass Media Panic, and the Coming of Television”
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman ““Invading Auditory Practice: On the War of the Worlds and #WOTW75”

Thursday 11:00 G21 Workshop on “Sound Work: Radio Production Cultures” with Shawn VanCour, Tom McCourt, and David Uskovich. Moderated by Antenna’s own Andrew Bottomley

Friday 9:00 K 22 Jennie Hirsh, “Transmissions of Fascism: Advertising Architecture through the Ente Radio Rurale Poster Campaign”

Friday 2:15 M8 Workshop on “The Problem of the Radio Canon” with Debra Rae Cohen, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, Jason Loviglio, and Elena Razlogova

Saturday 9:00 Radio Studies SIG Meeting! Special presentation Mira Burt-Wintonick producer of CBC’s WireTap and award winning audio documentary Muriel’s Message. She will present on “storytelling and sound design in the golden age of podcasting.” As my SIG co-chair Cynthia Myers describes it: “Part listening party, part discussion, this session aims to explore a variety of new sonic trends and possibilities in radio production. How do you make your stories stand out in a sea of audio content? What’s different about producing for radio vs. podcasts? How do you create a signature sound?”

Saturday 11:00 O7 Panel on “The Public Good Goes to Market”
Jason Loviglio, “NPR Listens: Psychographics, Audience Measurement, and the Privatization of Public Service Radio”
Christopher Cwynar, “Social Service Media?: Assessing the CBC and NPR’s Engagement with Social Media Platforms”

Saturday 11:00 O11 Panel on “Local and National Radio in ‘the long 1960s’”
Josh Glick “Soundscapes of South Los Angeles: Radio and the Voices of Resistance”
Darrell Newton, “Being of Color in Britain: Identity, 1960s Radio, and West Indian Immigration”
Eleanor Patterson, “We Are Not Reviving a Ghost: Reconfiguring Radio Drama in Post-network Era United States”
Alexander Russo, “Musical Storytelling to a Fragmented Nation: American Top 40 and Cultural Conflict”

Saturday 1:00 Panel on “Gender and Crossover Programming in the 1940s and 1950s”
Elana Levine, “Picturing Soap Opera: Daytime Serials and the Transition from Radio to Television”
Jennifer Wang, “Resuscitating The Wife Saver: Gender, Genre, and Commercialism in Postwar Broadcasting”
Jennifer Lynn Jones, “Signal Size: Gender, Ethnicity, and Diet Episodes in the Radio-TV Transition”
Kate Newbold, “‘Now The Booing Is Done in Soprano’: Wrestling, Female Audiences, and Discourses of Liveness in the Radio- to-TV Transition in America, 1940–1953”

Saturday 1:00 P10 Panel on “Historicizing Music and Transmedia”
Kyle Barnett, “Popular Music Celebrity, Jazz-age Media Convergence, and Depression-era Transmedia”
Kevin John Bozelka, “Everything on the Pig but the Squeal: Artist/ Publishers and Recordings in the Post-WWII American Entertainment Industry”
Landon Palmer, “All Together Now: The Beatles, United Artists, and Transmedia Conglomeration”
Alyxandra Vesey, “Mixing in Feminism: Playlists, Networks, and Counterpublics”

Saturday 1:00 P12 Morgan Sea of Tranzister Radio will be on a “Workshop on Trans Women’s Media Activism”

Saturday 5:00 R7 Panel on “Humor Across Media in the 1920s and 1930s”
Kathy Fuller-Seeley, “Becoming Benny: Jack Benny’s Production of a Radio Comedy Persona, 1932–1936”
Nicholas Sammond, “Extending the Color Line: The Intermedial Lives of Two Black Crows”

Sunday 11:00 T13 Roger Almendarez, “Radio Arte—The Formation of a Mediated, Local Latina/o Identity in Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood”

Sunday 1:00 U18 Peter Bloom “Learning the Speech of Counterinsurgency as National Allegory: BBC Radio and Instructional Propaganda Film during the Malayan Emergency”

Full disclosure before we go any further: I had a vested interest in this year’s IASPM-US conference, given that I played a bit part in the event as area co-chair for local arrangements (assisting Diane Pecknold, IASPM-US’ vice president). It was the formidable Diane Pecknold and the Program Committee that made this a success. What follows are my own post-conference thoughts.

The conference itself continues to be hosted at universities, rather than at the hotel conferences common to larger conferences’ annual meetings. Campus locations give the conference a kind of cozy informality. While the relatively small size of the conference might be seen as a reflection of popular music studies’ relatively marginal status in the U.S. as opposed to other Anglophone countries (most notably, the U.K.), it has also allowed the event to remain theoretically and methodologically open to a wide diversity of approaches and opinions.

While this approach can at times risk incoherence at its limits, it also can offer space for the kind of meaningful interdisciplinary that Stuart Hall practiced and championed for decades. This year’s IASPM-US conference, “Notes on Deconstructing Popular Music (Studies): Global Media and Critical Interventions,” was in tribute to Hall’s life and work. Following in Hall’s own methodological footsteps, the study of popular music remains an interdisciplinary pursuit. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been changes in the conference’s makeup over time. In recent years, music studies’ increasing interest in the popular has led to a greater influence from musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and music history. At the same time, conference presenters from a wide array of disciplines offered their own takes on the multi-faceted subject of popular music. This year’s conference included researchers in cultural studies, media and communication studies, global and transnational studies, gender and queer studies, race and ethnic studies, sociology, history, literature, American studies, sound studies, performance studies, and folklore.

Perhaps because of the conference’s dual focus on music as media and music in a global context, various panels took on these subjects in detail. Presentations by featured speakers Deborah Vargas assessed feminist queer interventions in pop music studies (“Musical Sociality and Queer Latinidad”) while Barry Shank outlined the political power and efficacy of musical beauty (“Popular Music Studies at the Limits of Hegemony”). The “Material Economies” panel looked at the intersection of music, media, materiality, and labor, while “The Business of Pop” examined recording industry texts, cultures, and practices over the last century. The “Roots and Routes of the Far East” panel mapped the globalization of Japanese pop music, while the “Transnational Music, Transnational Identity” panel investigated complex musical configurations and multivalent identities across national boundaries.

“Local Histories: Louisville’s Independent Music Scene” panel. Pictured (L to R): Brett Eugene Ralph, Ethan Buckler, Britt Walford, Rachel Grimes, David Grubbs, and moderator Cotten Seiler. Not pictured: Heather Fox.

Roundtables that featured Louisville musicians, archivists, and cultural producers offered a glimpse into the peculiar culture of Louisville across time. The Louisville Underground Music Archive opened its doors to show conference attendees its nascent collection. A roundtable on Louisville music festivals provided insight to how organizers understood their audience and the city they serve. In the “Local Histories: Louisville’s Independent Music Scene” roundtable, the audience heard Rachel Grimes (Hula Hoop, Rachel’s), David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Bastro), Ethan Buckler (King Kong, Slint), and Britt Walford (Slint, Watter), and others talk about their own experiences in the city’s music scene, while mapping that scene’s ethos and idiosyncrasies.

Evening events gave the conference a sense of place. The welcome event at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft allowed a peek at flyers to be included in the book White Glove Test: Louisville Punk Flyers, 1978-1994 (forthcoming, Drag City). Musical performances by David Grubbs, Wussy, and 1200 at the New Vintage provided a bill that reflected the musical, theoretical, and methodological breadth of the conference.

My take on IASPM-US 2015 – my first reaction in just the past few days – is that the study of popular music remains as hard to map as the city in which the conference was held. And while that risks playing out as a weakness, in Louisville it felt like strength.

As From Mercury to Mars series editor Neil Verma explains in his introduction over on Sounding Out!, Pomerance presents a study of Orson Welles’s voice itself — not what it does, how it was used, or what it “represents,” exactly — but a study that tries to get at what Pomerance calls “that instrumentation [Welles] cannot prevent himself from employing except by silence.”

Click here to read Murray Pomerance’s full essay over on Sounding Out!.

This is the penultimate post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for the series’ final installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang, which will be published here on Antenna this coming Monday, January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Convened around the theme of “functional sound,” the conference was subdividied into six thematic “streams”: methodologies of sound in the humanities; cultural politics and sonic experience; sonic artistic practices and research; sound design practice; soundscapes of the urban future; and pop and sound. Participants included a range of sound artists, sound designers, and scholars, mainly from the fields of music, media, and communications. (It is likely there would have been a greater mix of scholars if the Society for Social Studies of Science [4S] had not been holding its annual conference the following weekend in San Diego.) The conference also featured two keynotes, one sound art installation, and one evening of performances.

If sound studies is a field, it is one in which American scholars have an outsized influence. Michelsen anchored his remarks in a line from Jonathan Sterne—“To think sonically is to think conjuncturally about sound and culture”—an American who teaches at McGill University in Montreal. And two of the three scheduled keynotes were by Americans who now have positions outside the U.S.: Douglas Kahn at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Jason Stanyek at Oxford University. (A third keynote, by the German historian Thomas Macho, was canceled.) But the conference demonstrated that critical thinking about sound rests on an increasingly widespread base, geographically speaking; the conference was rich in scholars from across Europe, especially young scholars, and many of the attendees were graduate students who will be shaping the field in years to come.

In general, the conference program celebrated the diversity of work being done in sound studies, and the theme of “functional sound” allowed for the exploration of an impressive range of subjects, from the carceral soundscape of prisons to debates over jingles played on the Lausanne subway cars. With so many presentations, it is difficult to generalize about themes, but it was striking how thoroughly and effectively the talks demonstrated that sound matters. Either explicitly or implicitly, most of the talks had a clear political valence, engaging with subjects that had real material stakes, whether they were global warming (Douglas Kahn’s keynote), torture (Dominik Irtenkauf on extreme metal music used in military interrogations), municipal noise abatement laws (Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman on sonic racial profiling in mid-twentieth-century New York), or copyright law and the sonic patrimony of an entire country (Erik Granly Jensen on Denmark’s national radio archive). In some of the presentations the politics were more oblique (e.g., Jason Stanyek’s keynote on noise-canceling headphones), but taken as a whole, the conference resonated with contests over sound that had substantial consequences in the social and natural world.

Although, overall, the quality of the presentations was uneven, the field is young and is evidently populated by a growing number of creative listeners and imaginative critical thinkers.

The Velvet Light Trap has extended the deadline for its forthcoming “On Sound (New Directions in Sound Studies)” issue to September 1, 2013. Though the initial call was very successful, the Editorial Board especially welcomes any additional submissions that address sound-related issues and topics in radio, television, video games, digital/new media, and other non-film media.

The medium of sound, long placed in a secondary position to the visual within media studies, has experienced a considerable increase in scholarly attention over the past three decades, to the point that “sound studies” is now a distinct field of scholarship. Within media studies, sound-related research today expands well beyond the film and television score or soundtrack to include a broad range of scholarship on radio and popular music.  And while sound studies still tends to cohere around media studies departments, an increasing amount of sound media research is interdisciplinary in nature. A “sonic turn” is under way across the humanities and social sciences with sound studies work now coming out of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, cultural geography, American studies, art history, and cultural studies.  Recent issues of differences (2011) and American Quarterly (2011) and anthologies like The Sound Studies Reader (Jonathan Sterne, 2012) are just a few examples of this expanding range of interest.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap aims to build upon many of the new lines of inquiry that are coming out of this intersection between sound media and various other scholarly perspectives. In that spirit, we are seeking essays for an issue on the research and study of sound in and across a range of media.

Potential areas of inquiry may include, but are by no means limited to:

• analysis of music, voice, and sound effects in film, radio, television, video games, podcasting, and other digital or “new media,” including significant developments in audio aesthetics and style
• convergence of sound and visual media
• sound art and experimental forms of sound media
• materiality of sound, including sound reproduction and other technologies of sound
• media industries, production cultures, and issues related to sound labor, audio production practices, or the commodification of sound
• histories of audio media and archaeologies of mediated sound
• aural representations of identity, power, difference and the politics of sound media
• mediation of voices and language, noise and silence, and muteness, deafness, and other issues of the body and disability
• listening practices and sound media in perception and everyday life
• psychoacoustics and cognitive studies of sound media
• architecture, acoustics, and space, including “soundscapes” and sound media in relation to public health and public policy
• theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of sound media

Submissions should be between 6,000–7,500 words (approximately 20-25 pages double-spaced), formatted in Chicago style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a one-page abstract, both saved as separate Microsoft Word files. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. The journal’s Editorial Board will referee all submissions. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to thevelvetlighttrap@gmail.com. All submissions are due September 1, 2013.

The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media studies. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas-Austin coordinate issues in alternation. Our Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Harry Benshoff, Mark Betz, Michael Curtin, Kaye Dickinson, Radhika Gajjala, Scott Higgins, Barbara Klinger, Jon Kraszewski, Diane Negra, Michael Newman, Nic Sammond, Jacob Smith, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas, and Michael Williams.

With respect to its mixing capabilities, the Atmos system can send discreet sounds to up to 61 individual speakers and 3 low-frequency subwoofers. This updates Dolby’s recent 7.1 configuration (color-coded below), which consists of three full-range speakers behind the screen, a channel for each side wall, and a left and right channel for the rear wall. Additionally, 7.1 can feed low-frequency effects to an LFE or “.1” channel located behind the screen.

Atmos essentially keeps this 7.1 configuration but adds two more speakers behind the screen, two channels for ceiling speakers, and two additional LFE channels for the theater’s rear corners, creating ostensibly an 11.3 foundation. Generally, this foundation might contain the film’s music, ambient and background sounds, and — in the front speakers — the onscreen dialog and sound effects.

Most importantly, Atmos can send up to 128 sound effect “objects” to any single speaker in the auditorium. Whereas an offscreen bird might emanate from the entire left wall of speakers in 7.1, filmmakers can now mix the soundtrack so the bird emanates first from only the far speaker on the left, then from a front ceiling speaker, then from an adjacent speaker, and so forth if the filmmakers wish to recreate a bird’s circuitous flight through an auditorium. Further, because not every theater wired for Atmos will have the exact same number of speakers, the system can modify where it mixes its sound objects in order for that bird to journey identically through a 37- and 61-channel space.

This new means of mixing sound effects is known as a “pan through array,” and—as Dolby argues—the capability is an extensive improvement over the panning limitations of previous formats. Take for instance this early fly-over effect from the 5.1 mix of Broken Arrow (1996). As the airplane travels through the image from the background to the foreground, the sound pans from the front channels into the rear channels (circled in red below), creating the illusion that the plane is also traveling through the theater.

In Atmos these effects still exist, but the added channels on the sides and ceiling allow filmmakers more control over a pan’s speed and intensity. For example, as we crane toward the tornado in Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013; pictured below), the storm’s howls slowly engulf one row of speakers at a time in order to create a more foreboding atmosphere and pace.

However, we should not assume that these chill-inducing aesthetics are how practitioners will continue to mix in Atmos once this introductory period is over. To offer some historical context, when Hollywood first introduced digital surround sound to audiences in the early 1990s, films utilizing these new technologies were also sporting aggressive sound designs. For instance, during the final gun battle from Carlito’s Way (1993) we hear screams, gunfire, and other sound effects, yet when we listen to just the two rear surround channels we hear only guns and bullets.  The inclusion of only these sounds in the surround speakers would seem to create the illusion that bullets are actually whizzing by the heads of filmgoers.

(Here is an excerpt from the battle with every channel activated…

… and here is the excerpt again with only the rear surround channels activated.)

While Carlito’s Way typifies how 5.1 systems sounded during their first few years, such aggressive and kitschy mixes seemed to become passé by the end of the decade, with these more sensory experiences mainly quarantined for science-fiction or war films, and with most panning effects reserved for interplay between only the front speakers. I suspect a similar stylistic trajectory might also happen with Dolby Atmos.

So in lieu of treating aggressive sound mixing as essential to the Atmos aesthetic, we might conceive of the technology’s long-term appeal in two other ways. First, Atmos replaces each theater’s surrounds with higher-quality speakers that are capable of carrying wider frequency ranges. As opposed to previous soundtracks that were stored on 35mm, the increase in data space afforded to Atmos on DCP hard drives can then allow for more audio information and greater textural detail to emanate from these newer speakers. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, there are the ceiling channels. DreamWorks’s The Croods (2013) noticeably utilizes these new locations through its fabrication of reverberation and echo. During the film’s opening egg chase, the filmmakers mix Alan Silvestri’s A-TEAM-esque score so that it “bounces” off the ceiling like it would in a concert hall or indoor stadium. In addition, both The Croods (pictured below) and Rise of the Guardians (2012) feature fireworks and other elevated actions that take advantage of the ceiling’s speakers.

Ceiling channels and more detailed sonic textures are pleasurable additions, but they may pale in comparison to some of the more chill-inducing moments currently offered by filmmakers. If you are curious about experiencing these aggressive sound mixes firsthand then you may want to plan a trip to your closest Atmos theater before this type of aesthetic once again becomes passé.