1st Edition
Sounds of the Pandemic Accounts, Experiences, Perspectives in Times of COVID-19
Sounds of the Pandemic offers one of the first critical analyses of the changes in sonic environments, artistic practice, and listening behaviour caused by the Coronavirus outbreak.
This multifaceted collection provides a detailed picture of a wide array of phenomena related to sound and music, including soundscapes, music production, music performance, and mediatisation processes in the context of COVID-19. It represents a first step to understanding how the pandemic and its by-products affected sound domains in terms of experiences and practices, representations, collective imaginaries, and socio-political manipulations.
This book is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners working in the realms of music production and performance, musicology and ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies.
Introduction: Understanding a Pandemic through Sound
Maurizio Agamennone, Daniele Palma, and Giulia Sarno
Part 1 – Accounts: Sounds from a World under Lockdown
1. Listening to the First Lockdown: The Auditory Experience of Wrocław’s Inhabitants
Robert Losiak, Renata Tańczuk, and Sławomir Wieczorek
2. Together in Discipline and Turmoil: Remembering Public Sounds during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
Dominika Moravčíková□
3.Listening to the Hustle and the Hush: Sound, City, and the Pandemic
Nakshatra Chatterjee and Srijita Biswas
4. Applauses and Banners, Horns and Fireworks: Tracing the Sonic Expression of French Social Movements during Lockdown
Alessandro Greppi and Diane Schuh
5. Pandemic Soundscaping: Rediscovering a New Aura in the Mediatised Sonic Reality
Ludovico Peroni
6. Not People but a Sound: Virtual Audio and the Appropriation of Fandom Practices in Pandemic Football
Giulia Sarno
7. A Digital Archive of Participatory Location Rhythm Performances: Listening as a Way of Attending to the Pandemic
Marcel Zaes Sagesser
Part 2 – Experiences: Musicking in the Face of the Pandemic
8. Huapanguitos pa seguir aguantando en cuarentena: Mexican SonTube Channels as Emergent Digital Spaces of Music and Community during COVID-19
Daniel Margolies and J. A. Strub
9. "WHY DO THEY DANCE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PANDEMIC?" Post-Pandemic Cumbia, Mediated Live Music, and Digital Heritage from Mexico City
Michaël Spanu
10. Sardinian Traditional Music during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Marco Lutzu and Ignazio Macchiarella
11. Becoming Visible: Proud Roma and Sinti Musicians in Italy during the Pandemic
Antonella Dicuonzo
12. Rethinking Intermedia Practices during the Pandemic: Staging and Conception of Alexander Schubert’s Virtual Reality Video Game Genesis
Luca Befera
13. Musicians in the Brazilian Pandemic: Facing COVID-19 during the Bolsonaro Regime and the Aldir Blanc Emergency Bill
Suzel Ana Reily and Regina Machado
14. Musical Performance during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Days of Future Passed?
Alessandro Bratus, Alessandro Caliandro, Fulvia Caruso, Flavio Antonio Ceravolo, and Michela Garda
Part 3 – Perspectives: Rethinking Sound and Music against the Backdrop of a Global Crisis
15. Coronamusic(king): Types, Repertoires, Consolatory Function
Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann
16. The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Remotivity in Music
Mark Thorley
17. Music in Lockdown: On Sonic Spaces during the COVID-19 Pandemic, March – June 2020
Esteban Buch
18. What a Blackbird Has Told Me: Latent Acoustic Learning in the Times of COVID-19
Theodoros Lotis
19. The Sounds and Silence of COVID-19 Quarantine: Media Representation, Debility, and Neoliberal Biopolitics
James Deaville
20. Four Sounds against Capitalocene: Lockdown, Music, and the Artist as Producer
Makis Solomos
21. Afterword: Coping with Crisis through Coronamusic
Niels Chr. Hansen
Biography
Maurizio Agamennone is Full Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Florence. His interests span theoretical issues in ethnomusicology; poetic improvisation and other forms of sung poetry; living polyphonies; the activities and productions of migrant musicians; the compositional and performance practices in the European musical avant-garde; and intercultural exchanges in contemporary music.
Daniele Palma is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Bologna, working on evidence of Giuseppe Verdi’s operas performance practice in 19th century music periodicals. His research concerns operatic vocality in the 19th and 20th centuries, early sound media, cultural imaginaries of opera, and amateur music practices, from children’s records to mental patients.
Giulia Sarno is a post-doctoral research fellow in Ethnomusicology at the University of Florence. Her current interests span a variety of topics in contemporary musical and sonic practices, from avant-garde electronics, to oral traditions, and popular music. She is investigating the relationship between sound and football, and the history of the centre for music research Tempo Reale (Florence).
