After two years of planning, we are happy to share that on 5-6 August 2022, “Untangling Philippine Sound, Archive, And Knowledge” workshop is finally happening.
We bring together archivists, scientists, and scholars from different disciplines working on/in the issues of post/de-colonial Philippine sound histories and sound cultures. The workshop opens the conversation on the entanglements of colonial and decolonial sound research from different academic and scientific disciplinary perspectives: history, physics, engineering, biology, speech, media, performance studies, and ethnomusicology.
Three key conceptual paradigms—sound, archive, knowledge—frame the workshop. Researchers and scientists bring their sound archives to the workshop–sound collections that have been created in or for the Philippines with the explicit intention of using them for research or teaching within the Philippine context. The workshop makes legible from a cross-disciplinary perspective implicit scientific, academic, cultural, or social knowledges that are embedded in the documented sound cultures or in the audio technologies
Through the cross- and inter-disciplinary conversations, we aim to find the intersections and entanglements of knowledge systems within Philippine history, society, and scientific knowledges. How could one discipline learn or apply sound archiving from another discipline? How could one discipline learn or apply sound analyses from another discipline? How can we understand the different sound organization and listening practices in the different areas of knowledges? Can we formulate a sound theory from the entanglements of the different Philippine sound research practices and archiving?
Joining the workshop are: Elizabeth Enriquez (Media History), Kristoffer R. Esquejo (History), Franz de Leon (Engineering), LaVerne David C. de la Peña (Musicology), Oscar Tantoco Serquiña (Performance Studiesand Speech Communication), Giovanni Tapang (Biology), Sol Maris Trinidad (Musicology), meLê yamomo (Performance and Media Studies).
Participating in the workshop is composer and sound artist, Teresa Barrozo, who will be creating a sound composition based on the workshop conversations and the sound archives presented.
Untangling Philippine Sound, Archive, And Knowledge workshop will address three overarching themes:
Sound Archiving
What is the history of these sound collections? How are they formed? What was the intention behind the sound recordings and sound collecting? What are the archiving/cataloguing systems of these collections? How are the materials organized? What sound practices and knowledges have been and are being preserved? Conversely, what knowledges are produced by the sound archives? How are sound practices and knowledges documented? How can we interrogate the entanglements of local and colonial knowledges of sound archives? How do we engage the archival materials that are catalogued in colonial languages vis-à-vis knowledges in local languages?
Acoustic Epistemologies
How do sound practices, documentations, and recordings create, form, or constitute knowledges and understandings? What explicit and implicit knowledges are embedded within these sound practices, documentation, and archives? If libraries and archives constitute knowledge systems of an academic field, how might sound archives, libraries, and collections, form disciplinary knowledges? How do these sound knowledges constitute understandings of Philippine societies, histories, and scientific practices?
Listening to Philippine Sound
The sound cultures of the archipelagic republic of the Philippines are a polyphony of ethnic, linguistic, historical, scientific, and national imaginations. Its history is inextricably intertwined with centuries of European and American colonizations. How do we constitute aural and sonic histories of the Philippines? How do we listen to scientific knowledges of Philippine sounds? What understandings are formed by sound archives in the Philippines?
This workshop is a collaboration between the NWO Veni Project- Sonic Entanglements and the UP Center for Ethnomusicology. The paper presentations in this workshop are planned to be published as a collected volume.
We are also partnering with SOAS Radio which will produce a podcast series drawn from the workshop discussion. We will share more information about this very soon!
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