Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemNotes on Speculative Ethnography in Sound: two case studies( 2023)Speculation has long been part of humankind’s creative repertoire. This dissertation examines sonic speculation, focussing on two case studies whose content sits in dialogue with critical ideas from anthropology. In the 1980s, writer Ursula K. Le Guin and composer Todd Barton collaborated on an album of Music and Poetry of the Kesh to accompany Le Guin’s quasi-ethnographic ‘novel’ Always Coming Home (1985). This collection of thirteen tracks was presented to the audience as literal field-recordings of performances by a hypothetical future society. More recently, Berlin-based sound artist Andrew Pekler released Tristes Tropiques (2016), after the classic fieldwork-memoir of Claude Lévi-Strauss. It responds to the anthropologist’s meditations on cultural loss in Amazonia whilst also critically reflecting on the artist’s own listening tastes. The records diverge in form, function, and (unsurprisingly) technical sophistication. But, as this paper will show, they have key similarities, placing them both within the category of ‘speculative ethnography in sound’. Materially, speculative ethnography in sound is an approach that manipulates and combines synthesised and real-world sounds in often-uncanny ways. Conceptually, it applies a critical attitude towards social and economic relations in the contemporary world to destabilise static, dichotomies like Humanity and Nature, or Self and Other. In the absence of literature dedicated to this topic, the discussion draws on a wide swathe of relevant literature: anti-colonial criticism (including Marxist and indigenous perspectives), ecocriticism, and the ‘reflexive turn’ anthropological theory of the 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation considers the political role of speculative creativity, and proposes areas for further research.