PROVOKE: Digital Sound Studies

Department of Music doctoral student Darren Mueller is one of the three editors of PROVOKE: Digital Sound Studies, a new web collection of digital projects mixing sound studies, digital humanities and audio arts. The collection includes the work of two other Music graduate students, Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden and Kenneth David Stewart.

The collection is a result of a three-year collaboration, known as “Soundbox,” funded by the Franklin Humanities Institute's Graduate Digital Scholarship Initiative and the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. The website preludes a print volume by the same name (forthcoming from Duke University Press) that galvanizes the emergence of digital sound studies, a sensory-rich approach to research and publication.

The Provoke! web collection creates a home for creative-critical projects by makers, documentary artists, and sound scholars whose work presses at the boundaries of scholarship. Envisioned as “provocations” to existing forms of publication, these projects relate to one another through their deep engagement with sonic materials and innovative formal presentation. Read the complete release from the Franklin Humanities Institute.

The projects are eclectic, representing a variety of historical periods, cultures, and aesthetics. For example, Kenneth David Stewart's project, Finding Ibrida: Speculating and Prototyping Two Historically-Informed Guitar Bodies, is an experiment in embedding "uniquely designed electronic effects using technologies ranging from vacuum tubes to an Arduino" in a guitar body, while Geoffroy-Schwinden's project, Organs of the Soul: Sonic Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris, imagines how one might have heard voices, sound, and music in eighteenth-century Paris.