Striking the Auditory Chord of Harmony: The Rise of the Attentive Listener in Nineteenth Century Calcutta

The paper proposes to understand the accentuated attention of the aural sensibility that took place increasingly from the middle of the nineteenth century in colonial Calutta by focusing on the evolution of interaction between music and songs and the audience in the colonial metropolis. Historicising the audience behaviour from the street performances to the theatres of Calcutta, the paper highlights the process of skill acquirement of the habit of 'learning to listen' to music attentively which also in turn had certain social implications of sensory experiences. It argues that the causes were not only mental but architectural as well as religious created by the context and in a constant interaction with the imperial presence. Moving through a series of varied popular street song cultures which involved wit and repartee of the participants, musical soirées of Hindusthani music organised by the Europeans since the late eighteenth century to the Brahmo religious congregational music (be it within the closed walls or in the streets) the paper tries to capture the dynamics of subjectification in a colonial regime.

It tries to narrate the disciplining of the behaviour of the listeners; codes of appreciation transcending from loud ear-splitting cheers and spontaneous participation with the performers to the silences during a performance interspersed with interludes of clapping as mode of appreciation, which in turn influenced the group dynamics of a burgeoning colonial city. Simultaneously the paper also tries to encapsulate how driving away of the subaltern aspects of a pre-colonial leisure was sine qua non to this emergent code of sensory sociality.

Keywords: Aural sensibility,music & leisure, historicising sensory experience, colonial subjectification, sensory sociality.

Temple Marucci-Campbell (Art History, Concordia University, Canada)

Gut Feelings: A Portal to Immaterial Archives of Black Olfactory Resistance

This paper considers Alanna Lynch’s Gut Feelings (2016-ongoing), an installation that employs the spilling of kombucha and the hanging of SCOBY dripping with kombucha and gloves made from dried SCOBY. The sweet-stinky smell of kombucha that fills the space during this performance cultivates a poetics of Black olfactory resistance, and I will argue that the pungent smell of kombucha and the stickiness it leaves behind on the floor and many surfaces function as a way to ground immaterial histories of resistance tacit to Lynch’s Gut Feelings. The immaterial archive is a term developed by Jenny Sharpe and “refer[s] to the degraded status of African-derived knowledge, languages and cultures within colonial archives” (Sharpe 2020, 4). I will position the smell of kombucha as a link to immaterial archives, specifically those that center on Black olfactory resistances. An example of these is olfactory practices focusing on the medical and spiritual well- being of enslaved Africans in the hold of slave ships (Andrew Kettler 2017, 291). I will employ phenomenological and Black feminist methodologies to frame Lynch’s performance and carefully locate immaterial archives of Black olfactory resistance in kombucha’s malodour and sticky residue. This research will contribute greatly to sensory studies and art history as it looks to recenter Black sensorial histories previously left on the periphery of scholarly discourse.
Keywords: immaterial archives, olfaction, opacity,

Ana Hedberg Olenina ∆ (Arizona State University, USA)

Music from the Ether: Leon Theremin’s Media Environments and Soviet Techno-utopianism

This paper contextualizes the projects of the Soviet physicist and musician Leon Theremin (1896-1993), known for his invention of the theremin – an electronic musical instrument responding to gesture within an electromagnetic field. By making the “music coming from the ether” visible and palpable, Theremin aspired to tap into hitherto unused possibilities of the human sensorium and bring new forms of experience to the audience. In his early career as a physicist in Russia in 1918, he experimented with hypnosis as a way of enhancing visual acuity and concentration when analyzing images of X-ray crystallography. In the 1930s, during his sojourn in New York, Theremin declared his ambitions to stage “synthetic super-concerts,” where electro-magnetic vibrations generated by the performer’s movements would transmit not only acoustic sensations, but also trigger devices inducing visual, haptic, and olfactory senses of the audience. Upon his return to the USSR in 1938, Theremin was imprisoned in the GULAG where he worked in a secret lab engineering radars, rockets, and spying devices, such as an infrared laser microphone. Upon his release in 1947, he resumed his work in electronic music. In the 1960s, Theremin described his attempts to convert the electric currents (biotok) of his own body into sound. My research situates these experiments within the scientific trends of early Soviet techno-utopianism, underscoring the institutional and political contexts of Theremin’s inventions. I further consider Theremin’s instruments as a form of sensory prostheses, or symbiotic cyborg-like assemblages, foregrounding the implications of his experiments for contemporary debates in media theory, which are concerned, after Friedrich Kittler, with technological processes that happen beyond the threshold of human sensory perception.
Keywords: electronic sound, media atmosphere, synesthesia, cyborg, remote sensing