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

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

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

Sonic Bodies: the Skills and Performance Techniques of the Reggae Sound System Crew

This research project describes the performance techniques of the reggae sound system crew in the dancehall session. These are held until dawn every night of the week on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica. The research question asked is: how does a sound system work? The methodology is one of participant observation - what the crew do, with what, and with whom - as well as participant listening. This attunes the research to the auditory qualities of the sounds that the crew describe in recorded interviews, as well as the nuances of the idiomatic expressions they use and their tone of voice. Taking Jamaica's longest running and best-established sound system, Stone Love Movement as a case study, the research concentrates on the roles of three crewmembers in particular. These "sonic bodies" are: the audio engineers who design, build, finetune and maintain the hugely powerful sound system "sets" of equipment; the selectors responsible for the choice of recorded music played to the "crowd" (audience) in the session; and MCs (or DJs) who introduce the music and "build the vibes. " The crew's skilled performance techniques are investigated in relation to the phonographic instrument of the "set" of equipment for making sound, together with the media of sound, music and voice for diffusion of the vibrations to the crowd. These occur at three vibrating frequencies: the material waveband of the mechanics of auditory propagation and hearing itself; the corporeal waveband of the embodied kinetic rhythms of the crowd's dancing and crew's performance; and the ethereal waveband of the "vibes" or social and cultural meaning of the dancehall session and entire scene. Rather than the conventional technological, cultural and social "factors, " it is suggested that the crew's skills and techniques "make sense" of all these frequencies with expert evaluations, as the basis of their connoisseurship (Polanyi) or their logic of practice (Bourdieu). The engineer "just knows" when their fine-tuning is complete; the selector has a "gut feeling" when to repeat a track; and the MC "judges" the exact timing of the punch line. It is concluded that the crew's techniques are best understood as embodying a kind of rationality that pivots on ratio, analogia and proportion, rather than concepts of disembodied logic, representation or calculation. Thus the crew's evaluative techniques provide evidence for understanding the workings of the sound system as an apparatus for the propagation of vibrations

Sonic Media: the Street Technology of the Jamaican Sound System

Julian Henriques Sonic Media: the Street Technology of the Jamaican Sound System Abstract, July 2018 Sonic Media investigates the protean street technology and culture Jamaica sound system. It has based on long-term research amongst the sound system engineers and producers, including the legendary producer King Jammy and the Stone Love Movement sound system. This book takes us inside the boxes of the sound system to understand how this instrument actually works, how its been modified and developed over the last fifty years and why it remains at the epicenter of Jamaica’s compulsive and ever-inventive popular culture. The book focuses on the sound system as the audio-mechanical-electrical means of production for vibrations, as well as on what these vibrations themselves generate – the dancehall hyperculture. Identified as a street technology, Sonic Media gives an account of the practice and techniques of the audio engineers and their ways-of-making with trial and error, DIY, re-purposing and re-assembling components, not to mention their own finely-tuned ears. The techniques and phonographic processes by which the engineers and equipment handle the frequencies and amplitudes is analyzed in terms of a proposed Vibration Theory. Further to a rhythmanalysis, Vibration Theory addresses of the periodic motion whether rhythmically inflected or not – across a spectrum from the supra auditory GHz of a hard drive, through audible bass, the b.p.m. of tempo, the r.p.m. of a 7 inch, to the DJs set in a session, to the season cycle of dancehall activities. As against Information Theory, Vibration Theory provides an understanding of the process of communication based on meaning, rather than engineering of probability and signal to noise ratios. Vibration Theory is underpinned with a critique of the technocentric fallacy that bestows power to machines in isolation from their historical and cultural location and as independent of human embodied practices. It argues for the energetic propagation across a vibrational field, rather linear transmission from sender to receiver, as the most adequate situates, embodied, multi-sensory and multi-media model of communication. Prior to Sonic Media, Henriques’ sound system research in Jamaica has been basis for his feature film Babymother, his sound sculpture Knots & Donuts, his book Sonic Bodies and the organization Sound System Outernational