ABSTRACT
After a severe neglect of the sonic potentials in art-based research, the last decade has seen an impressive rise in utilising sound in diverse ways. So it does not come as a surprise to see/listen to a range of sonic art-based projects that have been developed in the pandemic disruptions: from sonifications of the virus to global collections of changed soundscapes during shutdowns or emphasising new ways of hearing a changing world.
This chapter intends to give an overview of existing and emerging projects with a focus on assumptions, practices, goals, and art-research relations. Based on a conceptual overview and an empirical mapping for approaches dealing with the sounds of the pandemic, it will be argued that current sonic approaches to changed (and changing) lived soundworlds run into danger of an implicit bias (“sonic classism”) and neglect wider potentials of acoustemology, a sonic way of knowing and being in the world. One critical point is the widely shared idea of an ecology of sound, where the quiet, serene, peaceful, and pastoral sonic scapes are romanticised, while neglecting the everyday sound reality of huge parts of the population, who do not have the luxury to stay inside, where noise incorporates tense layers of survival, life, and danger epistemes. Furthermore, fieldwork recordings and aesthetic modulations must widen their phenomenon focus to incorporate the increased blurring of offline and online, inside and outside soundscapes, of cracking zoom meeting voices, of coalescing private and professional sounds, and being acoustically at home and in the world. Finally, it is argued that the global North positioning of most sonic research has neglected listening to and with the global South.
