AUDITIVE AESTHETICS IN PERFORMATIVE CONTEXTS

A & P 2017


  • Event Date: ~
  • Submission Date: 2017-09-01

Humanities, Literature & Arts (General)



Aesthetics marginalizes great part of the “human” world of sounds. It is familiar more closely only with its one aspect, music. Thus it´s no surprise if music qualities (perceived automatically as values) are usually the only referential qualities in the aesthetic discourse of sound.
Auditive elements of aesthetic events are rarely intentional by authors, that´s why traditional aesthetics leaves it unnoticed as random and arbitrary. Reception-aesthetics of music puts the “human” world of sounds, the worlds of listening to sounds into the center of its interest. And because auditory observation is always intentional, it considers auditive qualities of aesthetic events for authentic dimension of aesthetics even without searching for “musical” meanings.
Auditive aspects of environment cannot be separated from the global aestheticization of our world; furthermore, auditive qualities of events refer to their actual semantic contexts. Auditive environment reveals a lot about the mental world of society that creates it through its auditive means, their over-usage or conscious or unconscious ostracism. Living environment is thus also an image of auditive culture that society forms via its sonic activities.
Perceptive and sensitive approach to sound has a variety of forms in the context of aesthetic communication. From environmentalist soundscape initiatives to creations of eco-compositions or artistic and even scientific activities of the network Sonic Fields. From the perspective of cultivating auditive space, its premediated modelling in different genre forms and different socio-cultural frameworks is particularly interesting. Despite ”musical” performativity as a subject, non-musical utilization of auditive qualities of space, material or a form of aesthetic communication linked with visual or literary creation is worthy of attention.
Performativity is one of the functions of expression not only in the terms of speech acts but also in the context of so-called communicative aesthetics (A. Popovič, F. Miko). We think of performativity in wider frame of anti-representation, strategies suppressing the representativity and operating with pragmatic respectively situational context.
Performative creation is a complex multimedia expression by nature and its incorporation into visual or musical/sonic genres expresses rather a problem of definition grasped with author´s inclination to one or another media. In numerous visual creations, auditive aspect has not only incidental nature but it is created intentionally as a carrier of semantic direction.
Literary creation attempts to focus the attention of a reader/listener to auditive quality of texts and to the act of its listening. The essential example of performative auditive literary actions in these terms are so-called sessions of slam poetry. Furthermore, phonatory qualities are considered in line of operativeness and challenge in the expression system of text (F. Miko). It is possible that the appellative potential of auditive expressional meanings initiates new forms of creativity in literature.
Auditive aesthetics freed from representational forms and established socio-economic relations can more easily defy standard patterns of commodification. Urban community projects intentionally working with auditive aesthetics incorporate also “non-cultivable” aspects, for example architecturally acoustically “pre-programmed” or reversely in no way acoustically non-designated spaces.
Its hidden auditive polymorphous nature can be discovered by creative work with its acoustic variables as for example in creative utilization of industry complexes or public spaces (site-specific).
We would like to envelope multifarious forms of auditive aesthetics in the upcoming issue of A & P, not only its fringe positions such as environmentalistics or exclusively artistic performances. Auditive aesthetics is most interesting in the space between them in inconspicuous (or non-representatives) forms of its creative modelling. We are welcoming perspectives diverting from closed reflection of musicology and uncovering extra-musical range of performative works with auditive aesthetics, is potential in visual, literary and multimedia creations.
We are presenting several types of performative work with auditive aesthetics uncovering its multidimensional nature:
-modelling of auditive space and its re-modelling in real time (auditive fictional worlds)
-work with auditive aspects of primarily visually-oriented creations
-non-compositional creative strategies of work with auditive material
-urban projects cultivating also public sphere of auditive aesthetics
-discreet even public forms of literary/reader´s performativity, reading sessions, creative recitation of “slam poetry” and so on
-auditive aspects of scientific performance as mean of persuasion
We will therefore attempt to illuminate with a reflector of scientific interpretation so far neglected, almost unnoticed, aesthetic that is listened to in the upcoming issue of A & P. We do not expect exhausting fulfilling of the topic neither confirmation of presented hypothesis; in the world of reflection, every attempt to understand a creative act remains inevitably only a hypothesis. We will hope that co-authors will be not only creators of hypothesis, but also its virtuous verificators…