Presentation and comments on „Loud India!” (2010) and

“Soundscape of Revolution” (Ägypten 2011)

Thursday, 7.7. 2011: bik-lecture

Haus der Wissenschaft, Sandstr. 4/5, Bremen, Germany

Sound Culture

Sound, in the widest sense of its meaning, influences our daily lifes, consciously and unconsciously. We remember certain sounds from childhood, we are getting annoyed by special noise during the day, and when we are travelling or conducting research we discover new and exotic sounds. Sounds are constituted by culture, and vice versa people create culture by sounds. Current approaches of the ethnography of sound is part and parcel of anthropological media studies, one reason to focus on the topic in our next bik-workshop on 7th and 9th of July at Bremen University.

At the lecture on Thursday evening the Italian Sound artist Claudio Curciotti will present two of his multimedia performances documented and created in India (2010) and in Egypt (2011). Claudio Curciotti is the creator of the sound web-archive Field Abuse, a blog focused on the loudness of the contemporary world in relation with religion, ethnic music and traditional cultures. Coming from an electronic music and digital media background, in his work emerges a sensibility towards the acoustic textures, intensities and the rhythmic relationship between sounds and images.

During the workshop on Saturday morning three scholars from Cultural Anthropology will give insight into ethnographic material from their current research projects dealing more or less with questions of sound culture. The whole group of participants will discuss on the material.