On November 5 and 6, CAS kicked off a yearlong lecture series featuring approaches from sound studies with the “Sound and Noise in Asia” symposium. Originating as an organized panel for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in spring 2020, the four papers that constituted the core of the symposium revolved around sound/noise practices and aesthetics from East Asian broadcast media such as radio and television. The central idea was to think about the dynamic between institutional broadcast practices, including sound regulation, and the element of chaos in noise that surrounded them from their beginnings in the Cold War period. Cultural policy in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China was fairly strong-handed and centralized during this time, but sound itself is difficult to keep within strict boundaries, tending to leak out where it is unwanted and becoming noisy—both literally and metaphorically.
The panel of four was presented as two re-organized panels, one on “Voice and Laughter,” featuring David Humphrey (Michigan State University) and Jina Kim (University of Oregon) speaking on the affective extremes of laughter and tears in Japanese television and Korean radio, respectively; and “Noise Aesthetics,” in which Evelyn Shih (CU Boulder) and Julia Keblinska (UC Berkeley) discussed the experience of early television as noise within the Korean and Taiwanese soundscape and as the source of a new noisy video aesthetic within Chinese cinema. Professor Cheryl Higashida from the English Department served as discussant for “Voice and Laughter,” while Shih and Keblinska posed questions to each other at the conclusion of their panel.
The keynote lecture, added for the symposium, was designed to give a perspective of deeper time to questions of the voice, technology, and aesthetics in the two panels. Judith Zeitlin (University of Chicago) gave a talk on the Ming conceptions of voice in Kunqu opera at the moment that it was claiming distinction from other forms of drama. Working entirely from a silent archive, with some reference to living practices of Kunqu, Zeitlin demonstrated the possibilities that were open to sound studies across several centuries in a Chinese context. Together with the four panelists, she helped to show that sound studies was not limited to its origins in mostly Euro-American cultural studies and its theoretical frameworks. Moreover, she proved that it is possible to study sound before the era of sound recording, a challenge that is still rarely undertaken in the field of sound studies. Professor Katherine Alexander from the department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, a specialist in early modern China, served as discussant for this talk.
The symposium was rounded out with a roundtable on sound methodologies, featuring Professor Zeitlin and the four panelists. Together, they discussed their discovery of sound studies, and the process of situating their sound studies projects within East Asian studies. Sound is a growing field of interest amongst scholars of East Asia, and as an area that has not quite reached its maturity, holds a good deal of promise for adventurous researchers in search of new approaches. The roundtable panelists discussed the fundamental interdisciplinarity of the field, which is due in part to the difficulty of working with—or even locating—sound archives. Additionally, they discussed the challenges of translating sound studies concepts from English into various East Asian languages, and the potential power of translating East Asian sound concepts into English.
This moment of reflection in the final roundtable event launched many of the concerns of the Sound and Noise in Asia lecture series, which includes researchers studying South and Southeast Asia, China, Taiwan, and the Middle East and fields from literature to ethnomusicology and environmental governance. In addition to bringing together Asian studies faculty and students at CU this year, the symposium also invited a broader sound studies community at CU to explore what Asian studies has to offer, and as a virtual event drew a good number of audience members from outside of the university.