Will Schrimshaw’s research while affiliated with Edge Hill University and other places

In The Soundscape , R. Murray Schafer describes a tone of ‘prime unity’, a tonal centre conditioning an international sonic unconscious. Diverging from the bucolic image of nature readily associated with Schafer’s ethics and aesthetics, this tone is found in the ubiquitous hum of electrical infrastructure and appliances. A utopian potential is ascribed to this tone in Schafer’s writing whereby it constitutes the conditions for a unified international acoustic community of listening subjects. This article outlines Schafer’s anomalous concept of the tone of prime unity and interrogates the contradictions it introduces into Schafer’s project of utopian soundscape design. Discussion of the correspondence between Schafer and Marshall McLuhan contextualises and identifies the source of Schafer’s concept of the tone of prime unity. Of particular interest is the processes of unconscious auditory influence this concept entails and its problematic relation to the politics of sonic warfare. Through discussion of contemporary artistic practices that engage with these problems, it is argued that the tone of prime unity nonetheless presents an opportunity to shift the focus of Schafer’s project from a telos of divine harmony towards collective self-determination through participatory intervention in the world around us.

Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.

Artists in residence Jamie Allen and Will Schrimshaw will lead two reading room sessions around the topic of noise as a form of pure potential. These sessions will discuss texts from Michel Serres, Friedrich Kittler, Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon.

Artists in residence Jamie Allen and Will Schrimshaw will lead two reading room sessions around the topic of noise as a form of pure potential. These sessions will discuss texts from Michel Serres, Friedrich Kittler, Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon.

Geophonography is a practice of sonifying the geological record, of tracing what Friedrich Kittler referred to as “signatures of the real”. The aesthetic efficacy of techniques for audifying and visualising data derived from geological materials is discussed within the context of Ur-writings, a piece by the author first exhibited in 2013. Tracing a line through the work of Freud, Adorno, Kittler, Ballard and Derrida, geophonography is positioned within a cultural context that has continued to draw inspiration from speculations upon the relation between earth and mind.

Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production and curation of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through opposition to the visual. This opposition of the auditory and the visual reiterates a dubious metaphysical distinction critiqued by Jonathan Sterne [The Audible Past] under the title of the ‘audiovisual litany’, a critique that seems to have largely been tuned out or to have fallen upon deaf ears. Addressing the limitations and homogenising effects that the predominant figures of immersion and interiority have upon sonic practice and discourse, Sterne’s critique is herein developed and extended to address the ideological predisposition towards the immersive and the incarcerating consequences of interiority. A critical survey of statements attesting to the immersive nature of acoustic space and experience, taken from a variety of significant authors working in the overlapping fields of sound art, sound studies, and auditory culture, highlights the extent to which the figure of immersion has taken hold within sonic discourse and practice. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalization and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational, and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the immersive and the immanent might serve as an initial means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.