Tele-Phonies: Listening at a Distance in the Arts and Auditory Cultures
Télé-Phonies : l’écoute à distance dans les arts et les cultures auditives
Published on Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Abstract
Building on the hypothesis of an interconnection between auditory cultures, perception regimes, and listening techniques, the Tele-Phonies study day proposes an analysis of the regimes of perception and cultures of listening linked to the multifaceted notion of distance. By taking into account not only telephone communication networks and mass radio media but, more broadly, acknowledging listening as a set of practices and media techniques of listening at a distance within or on the margins of these networks, we will try to understand their profound impact on sound arts and auditory cultures.
Announcement
International Study Day October 8-9, 2025, INHA, Paris Tele-Phonies: Listening at a Distance in the Arts and Auditory Cultures IMAGO-Cultures Visuelles Association, Tele-Visions Research Group (ED441/HiCSA)
Argument
The invention of the telephone, electrical telegraphy, and radio profoundly transformed the modalities of listening. These technologies accompanied the development of physiological approaches and increasingly precise measurements of sound phenomena. They fostered the emergence of a set of auditory skills, and structured listening as a specific bodily and social practice. The development of sound reproduction and transmission tools also led to the formation of particular auditory regimes and a series of spatial reconfigurations, which had a significant impact on the arts and auditory cultures, embedding sound, technology, and sound mediation within complex systems of social and aesthetic interaction.
Building on the hypothesis of an interconnection between auditory cultures, perception regimes, and listening techniques, the Tele-Phonies study day proposes an analysis of the regimes of perception and cultures of listening linked to the multifaceted notion of distance. By taking into account not only telephone communication networks and mass radio media but, more broadly, acknowledging listening as a set of practices and media techniques of listening at a distance within or on the margins of these networks, we will try to understand their profound impact on sound arts and auditory cultures.
Listening always involves some form of distance, whether material, metaphorical, geographical, temporal, or social. From a material point of view, this distance is embodied in technical infrastructures, which modify the listening experience and introduce a renewed relationship with topological, cultural, and attentional distances that separate us. In some cases, these sound mediations lead to profound spatial and social reconfigurations, giving birth to new aural territories. The notion of distance can also refer to social and cultural matters, such as inequities in access to technologies, but also topics related to disability and contrasts between different auditory cultures.
To address these questions, the Tele-Phonies study day will adopt a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on the methodologies of art history, media archaeology, and sound studies, as well as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and music history. The artistic objects and practices discussed will be hybrid, at the intersection of visual arts, sound cultures, and music, and more generally at the margins of techniques and cultural practices that usually prevail in the historiography of listening at a distance.
From the dream of a "four-dimensional" art formulated in the 1933 Futurist Manifesto La Radia to Pauline Oliveros' Echoes of the Moon project (1987), the history of art and music shows how imaginaries and listening practices have been nourished by radio, telephone, and even radioastronomical techniques. However, the modern desire for distant connection encounters the social and political realities of infrastructures and technical environments. Their materiality and cultural grounding challenge the modern fantasy of transparent communication. Since the 1960s and 1970s, artists have questioned the history of media techniques for transmitting and recording sound, adopting an approach similar to media archaeology. Other political, communal, and experimental appropriations of radio have since redrawn its social and material contours, while music and sound creation have embraced telecommunication networks. Sound creation at a distance was subsequently reactivated in a collaborative manner, foreshadowing the contemporary era of "mobile music."
The history of sound recording has profoundly influenced the imaginaries associated with a “schizophonic” regime. This regime dissociates reproduced sound from its origin through technical mediation, forming the basis for numerous psychoacoustic studies and narratives that suggest a spectral dimension to sound recording and transmission. Acousmatic listening and its technical means, established by concrete music as a true methodology for “reduced listening” (écoute réduite), can be viewed as a form of listening at a distance; the same applies to certain modes of vocal communication and techniques of the body, such as ventriloquism.
The various distances that traverse the history of mediated sound inform political ecologies of listening. Listening at a distance is associated with military and civilian contexts of espionage and surveillance; it can also fit into the generalized context of a "sonic warfare," where vibratory affect is redefined by the distancing and virtualization of violence. It is also shaped by technologies such as echo sounding and sonar, whose use within extractivist frameworks reveals the sonic dimension of natural resource exploitation in the Anthropocene and late capitalism. Perception norms, accessibility of mediated listening and auditory technologies are also questioned by Disability Media Studies. Recently, the widespread use of remote communication through videoconferencing platforms raises questions about the role of sound and listening in digital environments.
The following themes may be explored:
- Techniques of the body and distant listening
- Distant listening in scientific research; interfaces and sonification, acoustemology
- Sound recording, acousmatic listening; circulation of recordings; format studies
- Imaginaries and utopias of distant listening; space exploration
- Disability, assisted and augmented listening technologies, post-human listening
- Auditory cultures within telecommunication networks and mass media
- Digital paradigm of distant listening; videoconferencing and listening
- Ecological approaches to distant listening; extractivism and sound techniques
- Techniques of distant listening in armed conflict contexts; surveillance technologies
- Spectrality, “hauntology” of transmitted or recorded sound
Submission guidelines
The proposals (title, approximately 4000-character abstract, author's biography) should be sent in English or French to imago.tele.visions@gmail.com
before May 26, 2025.
Selection Committee
- Léa Dreyer (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- Evgenii Kozlov (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- Pierre-Jacques Pernuit (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- Clara Royer (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Subjects
- History (Main category)
- Society > Science studies > History of science
- Mind and language > Representation > History of art
Places
- Salle Vasari - INHA, 6 rue des petits champs
Paris, France (75)
Event attendance modalities
Hybrid event (on site and online)
Date(s)
- Monday, May 26, 2025
Attached files
Contact(s)
- Léa Dreyer
courriel : imago [dot] tele [dot] visions [at] gmail [dot] com
Reference Urls
Information source
- Léa Dreyer
courriel : imago [dot] tele [dot] visions [at] gmail [dot] com
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Tele-Phonies: Listening at a Distance in the Arts and Auditory Cultures », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13rdy
