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NEWS

IASPM Canada 2021 Conference Blog: Deanne Kearney

IASPM CA

The Intimate Sounds of an Online Conference (or the awkward silences that may ensue)

By Deanne Kearney


An accidental unmute during a presentation, static from someone's headphones, incoming email dings… So much has been written on the visual aspects of zoom creating different levels of intimacy and zoom fatigue, such as the exhausting act of performing your body language to a screen that is always on. Yet, what are the sounds of zoom that change our perceptions of the intimacies and insecurities of our spaces? Does it change our scholarship and relationships? How is this being reflected in the music industry during these trying times?

At a panel titled “Musical Intimacies and Insecurities” at the IASPM Canada 2021 conference, I was intrigued by Mathias Kom's research on “Antifolk in Berlin and New York: amateurism, failure, and cosmopolitan intimacy” and its fascinating connection with the new world of online conferences. Kom describes anti-folk music as a fringe music community centred around open mics and house concerts, which aims to mock the perceived seriousness of the mainstream music scene. Antifolk privileges the intimacies of amateurism, loserism and anti-professionalism. This talk inverts the conference theme to that of “Small Sounds from Big Places.”

Kom, in the question period, described how these scenes have had to morph through the covid pandemic; some scenes went online, and others rejected this idea, similar to the cancellation or morphing to online spaces of academic conferences. Arguably, it is easy (not in the sense of effort but in terms of control) to manage your appearance, background image and bodily performance on zoom. Still, some sounds, such as a cat meowing during a presentation, a partner opening a squeaky door or a baby crying, are left outside of our tightly controlled experience as professionals in a conference setting. Online conferences create an entirely new source of intimacy in the online space and a new soundscape for music scholars to study.

As scholars and practitioners sorely know, music recording changed drastically during the covid-19 pandemic, as artists could no longer go and record in a studio. Yet this created albums like Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020), described as a masterpiece that is “strikingly raw” and as a “wild symphony of the every day.” The album credits five different dogs, as the recording encompasses dog barks, claps, makeshift instruments, echoes and mistakes. These sound mistakes make a space all the more intimate, now generally lost in the technically driven and obsessed music space. Is covid opening up these intimate spaces? More importantly, will it stay? Questions in this panel that ensued: What are the standards of recording? How technical does it have to be?

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) album cover

Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020) album cover

Also recently released, Bo Burnham's Inside (2021), is a highly technical audio and visual recording from over the past year of the pandemic from inside one room of Burnham's home. The comedic artist solely created, starred and edited this performance, and offers the audience “backstage” access to, for example, re-recordings or new takes of songs, showcasing the artist in a totally new light. Burnham is interesting to read through the lens of another talk on this panel, Tony Dupé’s “How does inhabiting an alternative domestic space contribute to music-making?” Dupé explores how domestic spaces are a natural environment for recording music which connects with intimacy, daily life and the personal. Yet, he takes this further by arguing that “when that domestic space is a home which belongs to another, a separation from one’s own life can occur which fosters a fiction or universality to the content and performance.”

Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)

Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)

This concept could also be applied to our scholarship, or the readings of our colleagues, as we peer into each other’s spaces, where we have seemingly all been working in our lockdowns, presenting a behind-the-scenes look at our personal lives and the sounds they create. These sounds are confounded due to the lack of information we try to pull out of these online interactions. On-screen, we see another person but lack all body language signals. Therefore, we must compensate for any aspect of communication that we can grasp, such as these sounds, humanizing everyone’s experience in the pandemic and academia.

There have been some studies on spatial constructions and the influence of soundscapes on them. Using Raymond Murray Schafer’s (1977) work on soundscapes, Robert Nadler’s “Understanding ‘Zoom fatigue’: Theorizing spatial dynamics as third skins in computer-mediated communication” (2020) sees sound as an unconscious and instantaneous aid to interstitial space formation. Therefore, the many interruptions on zoom, such as a notification that “your internet connection is unstable,” reasserts that your interstitial space is one-sided. Some tech companies have decided to focus on creating 3D audio technologies for the world of online meetings, as they state that when in-person, we are able to differentiate individual voices in a room based on their relative distance from us, helping us – in a natural environment – to decipher who is talking. Yet this is stripped in an online and unnatural listening experience, as regardless of the number of people in a zoom room, all sounds come from one speaker, which remains the same distance from the listener. These companies argue that these sound issues add to zoom fatigue and 3D sound technologies can aid users.

At the end of her excellent keynote “Unsettling Sounds of Indigeneity: Reckoning with the White Possessive and Building Anti-/De-colonial Solidarity in Popular Music Research,” Dr. Alexa Woloshyn brought out her just weeks-old baby to meet the IASPM Canada community. In her talk, she questioned structure instead of content in academic study (on the topic of indigeneity and accessibility). She discussed how we do not have to do things as we did in the past; we need to open up the system. She did not provide an abstract to her talk. When asked a question, she stated that she does not need to have a perfect and poetic answer (although she feels the pressure to). What are our conventions in academia, and how do they change in the online and intimate space?

I write this as a call to embrace the intimacies of these musical sounds of zoom and music recorded in this time. After over a year of online conferences, meetings and classes, I was always exhausted by the performance of video calls. Yet, this conference was quite different as it continuously embraced the platform, sounds, awkward banter and silences - as they were not ignored by participants or made out to feel unprofessional or amateur, just human.


Deanne Kearney is a current Ph.D. student in Dance Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her research follows the performance of popular dance and music and their interactions with the online world. Kearney is a commercial and hip-hop dancer, as well as a freelance dance writer and critic. Her writing can be found at DeanneKearney.com.


Citations:

Dupé, Tony. “How does inhabiting an alternative domestic space contribute to music-making?” IASPM-Canada 2021: Big Sounds from Small Places, Sydney, Nova Scotia (Virtual), 10-17 June, 2021.

Fiona Apple. Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Epic. 2020.

Inside. Burnham, Bo. Netflix. 2021. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81289483

Kom, Mathis. “Antifolk in Berlin and New York: amateurism, failure, and cosmopolitan intimacy.” IASPM-Canada 2021: Big Sounds from Small Places, Sydney, Nova Scotia (Virtual), 10-17 June, 2021.

Nadler, Robby. “Understanding ‘Zoom Fatigue’: Theorizing Spatial Dynamics as Third Skins in Computer-Mediated Communication.” Computers and Composition, vol. 58, 2020, p. 102613, doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102613.

Nussbaum, Emily. “Fiona Apple's Art of Radical Sensitivity.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 16 Mar. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/fiona-apples-art-of-radical-sensitivity.

Pelly, Jenn. “Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 17 Apr. 2020, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters/.

Schafer, Raymond Murray. “The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.” Rochester: Destiny Books (1977).

Sparrow, Mark. “Why Do We Suffer From Zoom Fatigue? It's All About The Sound.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 8 Aug. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/marksparrow/2020/08/07/why-do-we-suffer-from-zoom-fatigue-its-all-about-the-sound/?sh=2bb52c4c4d87.

Woloshyn, Alexa. “Unsettling Sounds of Indigeneity: Reckoning with the White Possessive and Building Anti-/De-colonial Solidarity in Popular Music Research.” IASPM-Canada 2021: Big Sounds from Small Places, Sydney, Nova Scotia (Virtual), 10-17 June, 2021.