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. We began the process of following up our local PDRAs at universities in Australia, USA and Brazil. 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.
Putting our research methodologies into action, we initiated our first Practice-as-Research conference – 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 member traveling to several of the SST countries, establishing links with local researchers, making workshop visits and commissioning case studies, including films.
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) at (4S) Conference 2022 Cholula Mexico, in December 2022. This included screening some of our commissioned short ten-minute case study documentaries from India, Brazil and Columbia.
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.
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. Dr Brian D’Aquino has completed a chapter entitled “Hear the Difference” for Polisonics, a Focal Press edited volume. Also, several case studies have been completed and are ready for publication in our book series, Mobile Music Machines (Bloomsbury Academic).
