In Sawt, Bodies, Species, Gilles Aubry offers an account on sonic pluralism in Morocco across a wide domain of activities, including archives, music, art, healing, and ecology. Sawt, in Arabic, literally means sound and voice. Sound in Morocco thus intimately relates to the body; it never quite corresponds with its modern Western counterpart as a phenomenon separable from the other senses. Sonic pluralism recapitulates Aubry's attempts to think sound and aurality together with modernity and (de-)coloniality. The transformative power of sonic pluralism is expressed in people's acts of listening and sounding, aimed at questioning and shifting social conventions. On the level of ecology, sonic pluralism reveals extra-human agencies that mediate between people and their environment. Drawing on critical Sound Studies, ethnographic research, and artistic practice, Aubry's dense descriptions are complemented by audiovisual essays created in collaboration with musicians, artists, and scientists.
The book is available as print and Open Access pdf version on adocs.de
Author(s): Gilles Aubry
Publisher: adocs
Year: 2023
Language: English
City: Hamburg
Tags: sound studies, Morocco, sound art, sound, ecomusicology, technomusicology, ecoacoustics, soundscape
Introduction
I. Between colonial and ethical noise
The French Speech Archives, rwais sound, and aural mediation
II. Listen, That's Us!
Responses from Tafraout to the Paul Bowles Moroccan Music Collection (1959)
III. Salam Godzilla
The 1960 Agadir earthquake, technocratic listening, and the plural unsound field
IV. A wasted breath inside a balloon
Popular Sufi healing, postcolonial bodies, and sonic pluralism
V. Stonesound
Living with stones, lithic affect, and aural co-domestication
VI. Atlantic Ragagar
Seaweed, pollution, and the voice of the sea
Acknowledgments
Video and Sound Works
Bibliography
Image Index
