Browsing by Subject "Sound"

This dissertation contends that sound and aurality ought to be more fully integrated into how gender and sexuality are thought. The dissertation’s title, “Partial Figures,” refers to its aims: not to exhaustively document the status of sound within discourses of sexual difference and dissidence, but rather to sketch how queer and feminist thought might draw on sound’s resources. The project is thus situated within the longer trajectory of visual approaches to power and gender. “Partial Figures” also describes what I suggest are sound and aurality’s specific erosion of the figure as a presumptive requirement of approaches to social life and aesthetic form. By partial, I mean both incomplete and nonunitary, subject to the decay and growth, the putative disfigurement, that Hortense Spillers describes under the rubric of flesh. Finally, the notion of being partial, as opposed to impartial, is also at play. Partiality -- having a weakness for something – describes an orientation that bridges affection and dependency or debility; it compromises aesthetics as a site for the exercise of judgement. To be partial to something or someone is to be rendered incomplete by that thing, a torsion or disfigurement that marks queer and feminist method. By considering notions of musical flavor and corporeality (Chapter 1), queer sound ecologies (Chapter 2), and gendered ontologies of frequency and vibration (Chapter 3), I revisit key conceptual knots within theories of gender and sexuality that require a more sustained attention to sound and aurality.

I focus on two fundamental preoccupations within queer and feminist scholarship that, I argue, are reconfigured by the methodological, material, and historical resources of sound: corporeality (Chapter 1) and ecology (Chapter 2). From this assessment of sound’s essential resources for theories of gender and sexuality, Chapter 3 then moves, through a consideration of sexual difference as noise, to suggest that sonic ontologies likewise cannot properly be thought without queer and feminist method.

The first chapter concerns corporeality as a principal site of feminist theory’s turn to questions of matter and affect in the 2000s. For some influential theorists, I argue, an ambiguous and overdetermined relationship between food, fatness, and “epidemic” debility became a cipher for the specifically causative or agential powers of matter and affect. I show, however, that these powers have already been thought otherwise in the overlapping contexts of black studies and musicology. I take up notions of musical flavor and culinary sound in the work of Fred Moten and Theodor Adorno, respectively, alongside Hortense Spillers’ account of ungendered flesh as resisting figuration in the sense of both embodiment and (ac)counting. Like fatness, musical flavor is felt as the distension and elaboration of form and enjoyment, its aesthetic and figural enrichments taken for a failure to budget and apportion pleasure, need, and dependency. Within feminism’s turn toward corporeal matter, I argue, fatness and food have been made to serve as both a hinge and an impasse. On the one hand, the purported links between eating, fatness, and debility have been taken as the very image of self-evident causation. On the other hand, however, fatness troubles etiology, generating endless (and to date, inconclusive) speculation about what causes it and how its alleged social pathology might be reversed. Its status as a site of commingled growth and purported decay, life and “premature” death or debility, has presented itself to some writers as an apparent conundrum. In addition to Moten, Adorno, and Spillers, I draw on critiques of causality by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Michel Foucault. The nonopposition of growth and decay, life and debility, enjoyment and dependency, emerges through music and artworks by Future, UGK, Anicka Yi, Alvin Lucier, and Constantina Zavitsanos, among others.

Chapter 2 concerns a second historically vexed site for thinking gender and sexuality: nature and ecology. I approach the relation between sex, ecology, and sound through one of queer theory’s founding preoccupations: “public,” outdoor, or undomestic sexual gathering. “Public sex” has been imagined as a question of sightlines and their obstruction, but I argue that its sociality is given form by acoustics and acute sensitivity to environmental sound in spaces where visual obscurity offers both protection and danger. I read the 1998 album Second nature: an electro-acoustic pastoral, produced from field recordings of a parkland cruising ground by the group Ultra-red, who develop an audio ecology of this queer sexual commons alongside a critique of the pastoral as a site of musical and ecological containment. Works by Samuel Delany, Simon Leung, June Jordan, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady, TLC, and others situate Ultra-red’s Second nature within an understanding of a sexual commons that views need and dependency as forms of ecological wealth.

Chapter 3 considers noise as a figure for feminine sexual difference, suggesting that ontologies of sound must be conditioned by queer and feminist thought. My argument proceeds through an account of chatter, frequency, and perpetual motion, considering Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” chatbots, gifs, David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, consciousness-raising, and the work of artists Jessica Vaughn, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Pauline Oliveros. Questions of frequency and vibration have emerged as part of sonic ontologies in recent years; I trace the entry of vibration and “vibes” into U.S. popular discourse in the early 20th century through the theological and musicological writing of Sufi Inayat Khan. Among his areas of influence, I focus on the history of modern dance, particularly its Orientalist preoccupation with the animated wave-forms of loose fabric, which was demonstrably molded by Khan’s theories of vibration. This racially and sexually marked “signature” gesture was the subject of several intellectual property lawsuits that sustained legal ambiguity about the status of performance as property.

A trapped Fermi gas near a collisional resonance provides a unique laboratory for testing many-body theories in a variety of fields. The ultracold Fermi gas produced in our lab is comprised of the lowest two spin states of $^6$Li. At 834 G there is a collisional or Feshbach resonance between the two spin states. The scattering length between trapped atoms of opposing spins far exceeds the interparticle spacing of the gas. On resonance, a strongly interacting, unitary, Fermi gas is created which exhibits universal behavior. The unitary Fermi gas is a prototype for other exotic systems in nature from nuclear matter to neutron stars and high temperature superconductors.

For magnetic fields less than 834 G the scattering length is positive, and pairs Fermi atoms can form molecular dimers. These dimers, comprised of two fermions, are bosons. At ultracold temperatures the molecular bosons populate the lowest energy level and form a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC). For magnetic fields greater than 834G the scattering length between fermions in opposing spin states is negative, like Cooper pairs formed between electrons in a superconductor. The Bardeen, Cooper, and Shriefer (BCS) theory was developed to describe the pairing effect in the context of superconductors. In our experiment we produce an ultracold unitary gas. By tuning the magnetic field to either side of the Feshbach resonance we can transform the gas into a weakly interacting BEC or BCS superfluid. Therefore, the region near a Feshbach resonance is called the BEC-BCS crossover.

This dissertation presents a precision measurement of the hydrodynamic sound velocity in an ultracold Fermi gas near a Feshbach resonance. The sound velocity is measured at various magnetic fields both above and below resonance. Moreover, we are able compare our measurements to theoretical descriptions of hydrodynamic sound propagation. Further, our measurement of sound velocity exactly reproduces the non-perturbative case, eliminating the need to consider nonlinear effects. At resonance the sound velocity exhibits universal scaling with the Fermi velocity to within 1.8\% over a factor of 30 in density. In a near zero temperature unitary gas the average sound velocity at the axial center was measured, $c(0)/v_F$ = 0.364(0.005), as well as the universal constant, $\beta$ = -0.565(0.015). The measurement of sound velocity in an ultracold gas throughout the BEC-BCS crossover provides further evidence of the continuous connection between the physics of the BEC, unitary, and BCS systems.

“Sounding Reconstruction at St Paul’s Cathedral, 1660–1714” is a study of the sonic and musical history of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It examines how musical and sonic signification played a role in the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666, led by architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723). During reconstruction the monarchy, the Church of England, and Parliament were able to implicate sounds produced both within and outside London’s St Paul’s into a narrative of institutional power. Relationships between the cathedral, the monarchy, the Anglican Church, and the people of London were redrawn, reinterpreted, and affected by sonic parameters; through noise pollution, acoustical construction, and sung liturgy, sounds at St Paul’s came to signify progress, excellence, and divine authority for London’s institutions, to the detriment of the Capital’s own citizens. I argue that sound is analogous to power within the cathedral, and that those sounds represent a microcosm of the social networks, overlapping authorities, and architectural spaces in Restoration London. This project thus contributes to a paradigmatic shift in understanding the rich complexities of sound and its broad impact on culture in the early modern period.

This study thus contributes to a paradigmatic shift in understanding the rich complexities of sound and its broad impact on culture in the early modern period. Interpreting St Paul’s as a monument, a symbol, and a metaphor is essential to clarifying its complex relationship with soundscapes, the nation’s capital, and its authoritative, political institutions.

This dissertation recruited 24 premature infants born less than 32 weeks gestational age over a one year time period from October 2010 to 2011. The goals were to longitudinally measure cerebral oxygen saturation, evaluate how environmental variables controlled by nursing, positioning and noise, affect cerebral oxygen saturations, and examine the relationship between cerebral oxygen saturation and two currently measured vital signs.

Using mixed general linear models, findings from this dissertation showed the developmental trajectory of cerebral oxygen saturation values in premature infants' began in the high 70s during the first two days of life and then significantly decreased into the mid-60s over several weeks during hospitalization in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The trajectory of cerebral oxygen saturation during the first week of life in those infants who developed an IVH did not significantly differ from those infants without IVH. At this time, use of cerebral oxygen saturation to identify those infants at risk for IVH during the first week of life cannot be supported, but findings may indicate that cerebral oxygen saturation monitoring could potentially monitor the severity of the impact of IVH later during hospitalization as those infants with an IVH had significantly lower cerebral oxygen saturation values after the third week of life. In this case, cerebral oxygen saturation might help to understand the long-term degree of neurological damage.

Heart rate and peripheral oxygenation were chosen as the two physiologic variables to compare to cerebral oxygen saturation and average cerebral oxygen saturation was lower with higher heart rate and higher with higher peripheral oxygenation. Peripheral oxygenation that is already routinely measured in premature infants appears to not provide an accurate measure of the changes in cerebral oxygen saturation. Cerebral oxygen saturation monitoring is highly suggested for those infants who are at risk for neurological damage such as infants with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy or seizures since peripheral oxygenation does not appear to be an appropriate proxy for cerebral oxygenation.

Finally, sound and positioning were chosen to represent two frequently encountered components of the neonatal intensive care environment that also influence infant cerebral oxygen saturation. A peak in sound from the ambient sound level was only 5 decibels and found to not significantly affect cerebral oxygen saturation values. A neutral position considered the gold standard-- supine, head midline--was compared to five other positions widely used by NICU nurses. However, results showed positions with a turned head did not significantly change cerebral oxygen saturation from the neutral position. Yet, differences in cerebral oxygen saturation were found between two lateral positions (left lateral and right lateral, head elevated 15°) with an elevated head measuring lower cerebral oxygen saturation levels.

Filmmakers shared in the social and political struggles that took place globally around the year 1968, by registering the movements and forging new approaches to filmmaking. Focusing on the cases of France and Italy, this dissertation explores how different sonic strategies were deployed at the time in the staging of the emerging voices—feminist struggle, workers’ fight—and to counter dominant discourses, particularly those broadcast on official media. Political films in the seventies often relied on the promise of Eisensteinian montage to awaken spectators’ consciousness. Yet, those years were also marked by a distrust and a critique of the visual: Laura Mulvey definition of the “male gaze” or Guy Debord critique of the “society of spectacle” amongst others challenged the frameworks of representation. I argue that some directors turned to the soundtrack of their films to stake a position within the political debates of the time. For Deleuze, this moment coincided with the advent of cinema into a true audio-visual media: sound emancipated itself from images. I suggest that this new autonomy closely tracks the emancipation of the repressed voices from institutions’ discursive codings. Interlacing film and sound studies with history, “The Sound and the Flurry of 1970s French and Italian Cinema” focuses on works by Chantal Akerman, Claude Faraldo, Marco Ferreri, Elio Petri, and Ettore Scola in their contexts. Analyses of this corpus mobilize the concepts of asynchrony and polyphony as investigative tools into both the relationships between sounds themselves and the relationship between sound and image. The use of asynchrony—as theorized by Pudovkin—allows for a representation of the social conflicts as collective experience while still rendering the individual struggle. The polyphonic dimension of soundtracks enabled directors to stage the conflicts and challenges carried by these emerging voices. The simultaneous diffusion of multiple and dissonant sounds allowed movies at once to grasp and partake in 1970s political, aesthetic and social tensions.