Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SST (Sonic Street Technologies (SST): their diaspora and what they tell us about technology and scientific knowledge)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
The issue the Sonic Street Technologies (SST) project addresses is the lack of understanding of how technology and culture constitute each other. This is not a one-way relationship of either technological determinism or social construction. This inter-relationship between technology and culture is most evident with “street technology,” as distinct from its pervasive mass-produced corporate counterpart. SST investigates the subaltern mobile apparatuses for playing recorded music in public spaces in the Global South. Jamaican reggae sound systems, Brazilian aparelhagem, Mexican sonideros and Colombian picos are examples. In each instance SST practitioners have a hitherto hardly recognized depth of embodied engineering knowledge and subtle appreciation of the effects of sound on their audience.
There are two respects in which it is important for society to address the issue of the role of technology within it. For marginalized communities in Global South who have originated these SST, the research process provides an important contribution to these communities. Making our research results accessible with documentary film screenings, interviews on our YouTube channel and weekly blog encourages them to recognize themselves. It also helps SST practitioners gain respect from the wider society for the cultural creativity and technological inventiveness of their contribution to the country’s popular culture. Thus, our research contributes to their ongoing struggle against the economic, class and racial marginalization SST face across the Global South.
For the societies in the Global North, the research from the SST street “laboratory” is important in providing evidence of technology for community benefit. SST are designed especially for shared social experiences and community building, distinct from corporate profit. They pioneer frugal ways of “being with” technology that favors re-purposing rather than upgrading and small-scale workshop production rather than mass-production, for instance, as is increasingly considered as a planetary benefit.
The overall objective of the SST project is to establish a new research field focusing on bottom-up technological inventiveness. This is established with a global mapping of SST that provides the empirical basis for this extensive field. These are completed with in-depth qualitative case studies of indictive SST. This research field aims to provide evidence for the alternative embodied, situated and tacit knowledge systems that are essential for recognizing the true value of technology for serving human development.
There are two respects in which it is important for society to address the issue of the role of technology within it. For marginalized communities in Global South who have originated these SST, the research process provides an important contribution to these communities. Making our research results accessible with documentary film screenings, interviews on our YouTube channel and weekly blog encourages them to recognize themselves. It also helps SST practitioners gain respect from the wider society for the cultural creativity and technological inventiveness of their contribution to the country’s popular culture. Thus, our research contributes to their ongoing struggle against the economic, class and racial marginalization SST face across the Global South.
For the societies in the Global North, the research from the SST street “laboratory” is important in providing evidence of technology for community benefit. SST are designed especially for shared social experiences and community building, distinct from corporate profit. They pioneer frugal ways of “being with” technology that favors re-purposing rather than upgrading and small-scale workshop production rather than mass-production, for instance, as is increasingly considered as a planetary benefit.
The overall objective of the SST project is to establish a new research field focusing on bottom-up technological inventiveness. This is established with a global mapping of SST that provides the empirical basis for this extensive field. These are completed with in-depth qualitative case studies of indictive SST. This research field aims to provide evidence for the alternative embodied, situated and tacit knowledge systems that are essential for recognizing the true value of technology for serving human development.
The work performed from the beginning of the project can best be described in chronological order. We began with assembling the core team at Goldsmiths consisting of Senior Researcher Dr Brian D’Aquino and Researcher Aadita Chaudhury, joined later by Senior Research Assistant Dr Natalie Hyacinth and Dr Yael Gerson, our research manager. With these in place, we began the process of following up our local PDRAs and began the negotiations for our Collaborator agreement with universities in Australia, USA and Brazil, as well as for our commissioned research with university partners in Canada, Mexico, France and Jamaica. Simultaneously, we designed and launched our website and Brian D’Aquino developed our online questionnaire to populate the Sonic Map, showing the global distribution of SST. We have also staged an online SST researcher and research agent symposium and one in person for Goldsmiths colleagues, as well as an ambitious, 6-day international symposium in July 2021 (online. due to COVID-19 travel restrictions), organized in collaboration with our sister organization Sound System Outernational, which officially launched the SST project.
Based on this groundwork, we put our research methodologies into action. This was initiated with our first Practice-as-Research conference. Billed a “reasoning session” The Future of Sound was successfully staged with our local partners in Kingston, Jamaica, in February 2022. It was followed by our second Practice-as-Research conference Generation 2 Generation at Goldsmiths in November the same year. Other research activities include team membera traveling to several of the SST countries, establishing links with local researchers, making workshop visits and commissioning case studies, including films.
From the start, the project has been keen to disseminate our findings with conference presentations from team members. As the PI, together with our Jamaican collaborators, I presented at the 7th Global Reggae Conference held at UWI Mona, Jamaica, in February 2022. As a team, we presented our research framework and plans in person at “Technology Justice: The Theories and Practices of Freedom”, at the Centre for Post-digital Cultures, Coventry University, in June 2022. Team members and several local researchers made presentations as “Sonic Street Technologies (SST) as a Means of Emergence and Survivance was a Closed Panel Presentation at “Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and Technosciences for Living Together”, ESOCITE/ Society for Science and Technology Studies (4S) Conference 2022 Cholula Mexico, in December 2022.
An important part of our research methodology is to share research findings with the practitioners, thus contributing to their efforts to build their local SST scene and gain greater recognition and respect from the authorities. This has taken the form of making documentaries from the SST research interviews, as with Rockers Sound Station about a leading Jamaican sound system and from the filming of the two Practice-as-Research conferences in Jamaica and London, mentioned above. The first screening is always to an audience of their participants. In addition, we have commissioned short ten-minute case study documentaries in India, Brazil and Columbia from the SST themselves, shown at the 4S conference in Mexico, mentioned above.
The research outputs completed so far include the publication of “Jamaican Sound Systems and Knowledge Systems: Practice-Based Research (PBR) in Popular Culture” in Performance Matters, 2023 (9.1–2: 316–335) by Henriques and D’Aquino. This accounts for several of the vital features of our research methodology, as developed so far. Dr Brian D’Aquino has completed a chapter entitled “Hear the Difference.” Tradition, Futurity, and the Black Time of Sounding in Channel One Sound System’s Sessions for Polisonics, a Focal Press edited volume, currently awaiting editor’s feedback. Also, several case studies have been completed and are ready for publication in our book series, Mobile Music Machines. On the UK there is Gopal Dutta, Mandeep Samra and Brian D’Aquino, Northern Reggae: Music, Technology and Community in 1980s Huddersfield and Natalie Hyacinth’s Soundin’ Lewisham: Black Sonic Life in South London. On Jamaica, there is Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Dennis Howard and Ashly Cork, Nine Decades of Sound System Culture: A Jamaican Genealogy, on Brazil, Natalia Figueredo’s Amazonian Technologies: Sound Systems, Audiences and Tecnobrega, and on France the country survey by Jean-Christophe Sevin: SST in France. Migration, Diaspora and Experimentation.
Based on this groundwork, we put our research methodologies into action. This was initiated with our first Practice-as-Research conference. Billed a “reasoning session” The Future of Sound was successfully staged with our local partners in Kingston, Jamaica, in February 2022. It was followed by our second Practice-as-Research conference Generation 2 Generation at Goldsmiths in November the same year. Other research activities include team membera traveling to several of the SST countries, establishing links with local researchers, making workshop visits and commissioning case studies, including films.
From the start, the project has been keen to disseminate our findings with conference presentations from team members. As the PI, together with our Jamaican collaborators, I presented at the 7th Global Reggae Conference held at UWI Mona, Jamaica, in February 2022. As a team, we presented our research framework and plans in person at “Technology Justice: The Theories and Practices of Freedom”, at the Centre for Post-digital Cultures, Coventry University, in June 2022. Team members and several local researchers made presentations as “Sonic Street Technologies (SST) as a Means of Emergence and Survivance was a Closed Panel Presentation at “Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and Technosciences for Living Together”, ESOCITE/ Society for Science and Technology Studies (4S) Conference 2022 Cholula Mexico, in December 2022.
An important part of our research methodology is to share research findings with the practitioners, thus contributing to their efforts to build their local SST scene and gain greater recognition and respect from the authorities. This has taken the form of making documentaries from the SST research interviews, as with Rockers Sound Station about a leading Jamaican sound system and from the filming of the two Practice-as-Research conferences in Jamaica and London, mentioned above. The first screening is always to an audience of their participants. In addition, we have commissioned short ten-minute case study documentaries in India, Brazil and Columbia from the SST themselves, shown at the 4S conference in Mexico, mentioned above.
The research outputs completed so far include the publication of “Jamaican Sound Systems and Knowledge Systems: Practice-Based Research (PBR) in Popular Culture” in Performance Matters, 2023 (9.1–2: 316–335) by Henriques and D’Aquino. This accounts for several of the vital features of our research methodology, as developed so far. Dr Brian D’Aquino has completed a chapter entitled “Hear the Difference.” Tradition, Futurity, and the Black Time of Sounding in Channel One Sound System’s Sessions for Polisonics, a Focal Press edited volume, currently awaiting editor’s feedback. Also, several case studies have been completed and are ready for publication in our book series, Mobile Music Machines. On the UK there is Gopal Dutta, Mandeep Samra and Brian D’Aquino, Northern Reggae: Music, Technology and Community in 1980s Huddersfield and Natalie Hyacinth’s Soundin’ Lewisham: Black Sonic Life in South London. On Jamaica, there is Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Dennis Howard and Ashly Cork, Nine Decades of Sound System Culture: A Jamaican Genealogy, on Brazil, Natalia Figueredo’s Amazonian Technologies: Sound Systems, Audiences and Tecnobrega, and on France the country survey by Jean-Christophe Sevin: SST in France. Migration, Diaspora and Experimentation.
The research progresses beyond the state of the art of understanding the relationship between technology and culture in several respects. It establishes SST as a research field with empirical evidence for the extent to which SST scenes flourish worldwide. It documents their variety and their history, often dating back over fifty years. This field advances recent cultural studies approaches to popular culture by emphasizing the technological mediation of lived experience and social identity. It advances science and technology studies and sociology by emphasizing the cultural mediation of technology. The project advances musicological studies by concentrating on the sounding of the music and where and how it is enjoyed. It focuses on the apparatuses facilitating the crew’s “performance” of recorded music and how these form the epicenter of an entire social, cultural and economic system.
The global scope of the project allows for first-time comparisons between different types of SST apparatuses and the common techniques to be deployed, such as re-purposing. Similarly, the unprecedented range and countries covered by the project allow for the investigation of various cultural influences on the selection, design and use of their equipment. This material will provide the basis for a definitive account of the key elements of the culture-technology amalgam.
These ambitions to progress beyond the state of the art are founded on the type of musical equipment explored, that is, the situated, low-tech, bottom-up, “street” technologies located in some of the most marginalized communities of the Global South. This contrasts with the top-down, mass-produced generic digital products and services that dominate life in the Global North - and research interests. The SST project reveals SST practitioners’ ways of making, knowing, and doing with technology, offering the kind of inventiveness that we should demand of big tech. It is these findings that will advance the state of art of technology.
The global scope of the project allows for first-time comparisons between different types of SST apparatuses and the common techniques to be deployed, such as re-purposing. Similarly, the unprecedented range and countries covered by the project allow for the investigation of various cultural influences on the selection, design and use of their equipment. This material will provide the basis for a definitive account of the key elements of the culture-technology amalgam.
These ambitions to progress beyond the state of the art are founded on the type of musical equipment explored, that is, the situated, low-tech, bottom-up, “street” technologies located in some of the most marginalized communities of the Global South. This contrasts with the top-down, mass-produced generic digital products and services that dominate life in the Global North - and research interests. The SST project reveals SST practitioners’ ways of making, knowing, and doing with technology, offering the kind of inventiveness that we should demand of big tech. It is these findings that will advance the state of art of technology.