Listening Through Social Media: Soundscape Composition, Collaboration and Networked Sonic Elongation

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Rogers, Holly. 2023. Listening Through Social Media: Soundscape Composition, Collaboration and Networked Sonic Elongation. In: Holly Rogers; Joana Freitas and João Francisco Porfírio, eds. Remediating Sound: Repeatable Culture, YouTube and Music. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 113-144. ISBN 9781501387326 [Book Section]

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Official URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/remediating-sounds-9...

Abstract or Description

This chapter is about the online mediation of sonic artefacts during the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. Over the last few decades, the manipulation of real-world sounds through online platforms has become increasingly prevalent. When uploaded, sounds and images captured by amateur artists from all over the world can instantly become compositional material for other web users, initiating a new form of communal, participatory and self-reflexive music and sound art. I call this multi-voiced elongation of noise from image ‘networked sonic elongation’ and define it as a technique that arises through multiple interpretations of an audiovisual event. As a practice of remediation, networked sonic elongation is achievable only through online collaborative processes. As a result, it has implications for how we listen to cyberculture and how cyberculture intersects with, extends, and, most radically, changes the world around us. Original or existing sounds can be remediated in one of two ways. First, cyber-users employ the process of sonic elongation to respond in multiple ways to the original material. This generates numerous interpretations of the primary audiovisual object. Second, users can expand upon each other’s versions to produce a series of variations. To focus this exploration, I focus on networked sonic elongation across and through YouTube during the first global lockdown, when quarantined populations across the world became more dependent than ever on online culture for communication, information and creativity: when the relationship between the real and the cyber became increasingly entangled; and when the democratised, networked potential of YouTube, with its accessible technologies, vast communities, established affinity spaces and potential for interaction became a vital place of sociability and information. I suggest that, during this time, YouTube became a post-media nexus of sonic resonances that captured the fear, pleasure and anticipation of Covid-19.

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Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501387357.ch-005