Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session

This research situates the multiple body of the Jamaica Dancehall "Crowd" (audience) in the intensities of the Sound System Session. This is a heterogeneous "acoustic space," and discontinuous ritual time, in which sexual expression and orientation, and racial attitudes, diverge from Jamaican norms. This essay proceeds to account for the propagation of this temporality and spatiality in terms of the electromechanical processes of the Sound System "Set" (equipment), that is control, power and transduction. It looks firstly at the Sound Engineers' sensorimotor engineering technique of compensation for monitoring and manipulating the auditory performance of the Set. Secondly it discusses the sociocultural procedures of the cutting and mixing of the music the Selector plays in the Session. The essay identifies these practices and procedures as the basic elements for many cultural, cybernetic, linguistic, or communication systems. In conclusion, it is suggested that for the Engineers' and Selectors' instrumental techniques to be affective and effective they have to be brought into a proportional relationship with the Crowd's experience. The Crew does this through their embodied experience and expert evaluative judgment - which is considered as an example of analogical, rather than logical, rationality

Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session

Sound connects people; it draws us together. It was Count Basie who drew me to one the editors of this volume. He was playing Lester Leaps In. And it was the sound of the music that pulled me in through a half-open door. Portuguese trans. https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/eco_po

Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music, popular culture - and with Sonic Bodies - the idea that sound itself could provide a conceptual framework and research tool. Every night Dancehall sessions stage a visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic dominance for the participating crowd - out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the three crewmembers responsible for this auditory signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful “set” of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks played; and MCs (DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Sonic Bodies proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic movement of vibrations. These provide the basis for an analysis of how a sound system operates - not only at auditory, but also at corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies establishes the basis for a vibrational cultural studies, as distinct from a cultural study of vibrations. It formulates a fascinating auditory critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in the mind, communication is an exchange of information and meaning is only ever representation

Jamaican Sound Systems and Knowledge Systems: Practice-Based Research (PBR) in Popular Culture

Working with popular street cultures in the Global South offers scope for practice-based research (PBR) to go beyond its application with creative practitioners in the galleries and theatres of the Global North. We start from an account of a “reasoning session” with reggae sound system owners, selectors, and engineers staged as a PBR event in Kingston, Jamaica. Such popular music cultures across the Global South have their own specialist apparatus for playing recorded music and—most important for a PBR investigation—their own embodied, situated, and tacit knowledge systems. These include the sophisticated arts of selecting music, tuning up a sound system, and the value of the culture for the communities from which they originate, as well as strategies for current challenges, such as police harassment and lack of government recognition or support. Accessing such grassroots knowledge systems requires not only a good rapport with local practitioners but also close cooperation with their own organizations and with local university researchers. Such PBR also demands sharing research findings—for example, by screening the documentary film we made of the reasoning session for its participant. It is concluded that practitioners’ ways of knowing as revealed by PBR can help challenge conventional ideas about the nature of knowledge itself

Echo

With an echo we hear both the original sound source and its reflection, noticing the delay between one and the other. Echo is therefore a particular type of reverberation, from the Latin verb reverberare, to strike back or reflect. It is defined as a propagation effect in which, according to Augoyard and Torgue (2005: 111), “sound continues after the cessation of its emission”. Reverberation occurs when surfaces bounce back or reflect auditory waves. Unlike an echo, though, reverberation is most often perceived as almost simultaneous with the produced sound, a resounding that effectively amplifies through instant diffusion of sound waves. Singing in the shower, for example, we hear our own voice in a louder and seemingly fuller version as it resonates against the hard surfaces of the bathroom. In such enclosed spaces, resonance and reverberation overlap as the harmonics of the original sound are reproduced. By contrast, stepping inside an anechoic chamber is sufficient to recognise the importance of this reflection for our day-to- day hearing; it can be a thoroughly disconcerting experience to be without this resonance of one’s voice, as though it never leaves the body

A Dominância Sônica e a Festa de Sound System de Reggae

Este texto marca o início do interesse acadêmico de Julian Henriques pela temática dos sound systems de reggae e aponta muitos dos interesses que desenvolverá mais tarde. Inclui, então, passagens descritivas da cena do reggae no estilo dancehall na Jamaica de duas décadas atrás, focalizando os engenheiros de som que constroem e operam as aparelhagens; considerações sobre o sonoro em relação a outros estímulos sensórios, sobretudo visuais; música e som; o conceito de “dominância sônica”, que propõe para descrever a presença forte do som em festas, bailes ou “sessões” de reggae; e a relação desta com o corpo do público

Digital Immortality

The idea of digital immortality is not new. The word digital has remained the moniker for “the latest technology” for three decades. We are technophiliacs because, as Freud might tell us – besides our own shit – technology is the one thing we make ourselves. Human kind – men in particular – have always tended to fall in love with their creations. This has been the case from the Greek myth of Pygmalion’s most beautiful ivory statue, to the marvel – again scatological – of Jacques de Vaucanson’s defecating mechanical duck of 1739. This perhaps was the inspiration for Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s bold proposition of Man a Machine published in 1748. The philosophical claim that we are ourselves actually only machines was of course made by Rene Descartes almost exactly a century earlier, in 1637

A Taste of Caribbean Technology

The Caribbean has long been considered a melting pot of Old and New Worlds. Writer, director, and cultural researcher Julian Henriques looks at the Jamaican reggae dancehall sound system to explore how this street technology has found creolizing ways to prevail in the neocolonial power struggle between popular culture and Jamaica’s ruling elit

Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis and Algorithm-Analysis

The contemporary Western world has been shaped if not actually born from the algorithm, it has been said. We live in a computational culture, more specifically an algorithmic culture, as Alexander Galloway pointed out more than a decade ago. One of the excellent New Economics Foundation reports puts it thus: “[algorithms] have morphed from curating online content to curating and influencing our lives.” Indeed, capitalism’s current financialized mode depends entirely on algorithmic calculation, as the basis of derivatives, high speed trading and the new fintech sector, for example. Platform capitalism relies on algorithmic machine learning and AI, as does manufacturing. Expert systems for medical diagnosis and robot surgery are built from algorithmic machine learning. Political campaigning exploits the micro-targeting of social media messages, as we have learnt from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, not to mention the Snowden revelation of the most extensive government mass surveillance operations the world has ever seen. Pattern of life analysis has been literally adopted in the algorithms of the “kill chain” of drone bombers

Duppy Conquerors, Rolling Calves and Flights to Zion

In Jamaica, a duppy is a spirit or ghost of a dead person. They are undead, but unlike their cousins the zombies from the nearby Caribbean island of Haiti, they maintain individual agency. Duppies usually take human form, though their feet are said to point backwards, in order to confuse anyone trying to track their footprints. They come out at night and are said to congregate under cottonwood trees. In Bob Marley’s Duppy Conqueror the proverbial hero fights back against these ghosts – of his vanquished enemies perhaps? – and “bullbucka” (bullies). “Yes mi friend, me der ‘pon street again… So if you a bullbucka, let me tell you this/ I'm a duppy conqueror, conqueror…” Not surprisingly the duppy has also been a popular figure in novels and poems as well as song