Even though you can’t hear it, infrasound fills the air. And because the atmosphere doesn’t absorb it like regular sound, infrasound comes from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. If humans could perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic sources from across the globe would shape our imagination of the planet's very nature.

In my research, I've developed infrasonic "macrophones" to make infrasound audible. Comprising a wind-noise reduction array leading to a microbarometer with custom signal processing, I've appropriated the basic technique from what the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect distant warhead tests. In this case, however, we're listening to a planet in transition. Unlike a scientific endeavor, it's not a matter of extending the horizon of human knowledge. Instead, it's about encountering those agencies greater than our own that connect us through the atmosphere, an experience that is both poetic and political.

JayVe Montgomery will present maps, methods, and practices of his NEA grant funded compositional field recording project Lake Black Town.

Lake Black Town is a research composition project where the artist is deeply listening to the sonic soil, water, and plant data of these “drowned town” sites to inform their resonant response to the call of history’s emptiness. Deeply listening to the liminal spaces and stories surrounding “drowned towns” by using creative field recording methods to listen to the recreation, racism, and hydroelectric progress built atop flooded American dreams, Montgomery constructs a modular composition of soundscape storytelling. This is an attempt at the modalities of Deep Listening and Great Black Music.

Yvette Janine Jackson examines the evolution of her radio operas from multichannel, electroacoustic fixed-media compositions to live and interactive performances. This shift -from creative object to process- serves as a vehicle for investigating distributed agency within Jackson's narrative soundscapes, fostering collaboration between human and non-human actors. Her compositions blend analog and digital synthesis, field recordings, sampling, and both composed and improvised chamber ensemble fragments, creating sonic reflections on historical events and contemporary issues.

Hiss, Hum, Flutter is a lecture performance that foregrounds the sonic residues of archival media documenting the so-called "ghetto riots" of 1964–1968. Rather than approaching these materials as historical evidence in service of a linear narrative, the performance instead takes seriously the incidental artifacts—hiss, hum, flutter, dropout, and distortion—as the primary material of engagement. These patterns of interference, often dismissed as extraneous noise, emerge here as signals in their own right, carrying traces of the medium’s conditions, its political entanglements, and its historical occlusions.

Part lecture, part video art, part performance, Eryk Salvaggio's “The Age of Noise" examines the state of the Information Age against the era of generative AI. Drawing on information and media theory, the talk is interspersed with original and found footage. 

Notes coming soon

As evidenced by the myth of the Sirens, western culture has long perceived noise as a threat to the autonomy and agency of the self. Today, white noise, noise-canceling headphones, and algorithmic feeds promise to protect and perfect the self by controlling the sounds and information we hear. In this talk, sound scholar Mack Hagood presents a cultural history of these “orphic media,” which drown out the noise of others, just as Orpheus combatted the Sirens' song with his lyre. The three modes of orphic mediation—masking, cancellation, and suppression—promise a safe space for the user, yet hearing what we want can carry its own dangers. The talk concludes with a look at emerging orphic technologies that combine AI and category-specific noise cancellation, promising the end of listening as we know it.

Brian House (he/him) is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. Through sound, subversive technology, and multidisciplinary research, he makes our interdependencies audible in order to imagine new political realities. His current project, Macrophones, explores atmospheric infrasound as a means of listening to the climate crisis.

House is a Creative Capital awardee and has exhibited at MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica, ZKM Center for Art and Media, V&A Museum, Beall Center for Art + Technology, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Stockholm Kulturhust, Science Gallery Bangalore, Fridman Gallery, Issue Project Room, Eyebeam, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, among other venues. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Guardian, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his research has been published in Leonardo, Journal of Sonic Studies, Media Art Study and Theory, and e-flux Architecture.

House holds a PhD in computer music from Brown University and was Associate Scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College. 
brianhouse.net
@h0use

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist whose compositions have been heralded as “immersive non-visual films” (The Guardian).  A Los Angeles native, Jackson was introduced to the world of tape splicing, analog synthesis, and computer music at the historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York before designing sound for theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area where she was awarded the first Theatre Bay Area Eric Landisman Fellowship for Designers and the Dean Goodman Choice Award for Sound Design for The Shape of Things.  She blends these experiences into her own aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition dubbed “radio opera.” 

Jackson’s electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral compositions have been commissioned internationally for concert, theatre, installation, and screen.  Jackson’s projects often draw from history to examine relevant social issues.  She has collaborated with historian of science and author Naomi Oreskes on Doubt for the Artivism for Earth Initiative featured at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.  Her album Freedom is described as “one of the most unique releases to chronicle the Black American experience” (The Wire).  She has composed for Elisa New’s PBS series Poetry in America and Barclay DeVeau’s The Cassandra Project short film trilogy. Recent projects include Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and electronics co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and American Composers Orchestra; T-Minus, A Radio Opera commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble; and Extant, an interactive composition for bass clarinet, cello, and game engine at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her permanent installations Underground (Codes) and Destination Freedom can be experienced at Wave Farm in Acra, New York, and the International African American Museum in Charleston. 

Jackson performs modular synthesizers as a solo artist and formed Radio Opera Workshop to perform her compositions, debuting at the Venice Music Biennale in 2022.  The collective has featured Tommy Babin, Amy Cimini, Tia Fuller, Joy Guidry, Judith Hamann, Dawn Norfleet, Jonathan Piper, Davindar Singh, Esperanza Spalding, Rajna Swaminathan, Malesha Jessie Taylor, and Taiga Ultan.
yvettejackson.com
@yvettejaninejackson

Will Johnson is an audio artist from the Bronx, New York. His work centers on blackness -- the material and immaterial conditions of space that shape sound into movement and historical record. He holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU-Gallatin. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition (2018) and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Musicians (2019). His commercial work includes licensed sound for Acura, Beats Electronics, HBO and collaborative contributions to 2016 grammy-winning best electronic album Skin. His live performances have been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Kitchen and MASS MoCA.

JayVe Montgomery is a site-specific improviser who breathes epigenetic listening into woodwind instruments and bells as a sustained decay descendant of the sound at the bottom of a slave ship. These soundings range from acoustic to electroacoustic; from horns and bells to samplers and turntables.

Of Jamaican and Louisiana Creole descent, Abstract Black / Jayve Montgomery was born at Ft. Hood, Texas on the last day of 1979 and raised a dependent of the department of defense in Berlin, Germany, before and after the wall fell; Rayne, Louisiana, before the frogs left; Columbia, SC, a home of the confederate flag; and Ft. Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division and Jimi Hendrix’s turn to music. Montgomery earned a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His staggering student loan debt makes him wish he hadn’t signed his life away at 17, 18, 19 & 20 to attend a predominantly white institution.

He is an outer music city sound artist and multi-instrumentalist of the Chicago school of Free, Creative, and Improvised musics, Sonic Healing Ministries sector. He was Senior Program Specialist for the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio (2006-2013), a collaborative sound making program for youth and people with disabilities. He was also a curator and artist-in-residence at Brown Rice (2008-2012), an art space for listening in Chicago, IL. 

Since moving to Nashville, he has become an integral member of the improvised and experimental music scene of the city and region; gaining local recognition for Nashville Scene solo performance of the year 2019; and becoming alum of Pitchfork Music Festival (Standing on the Corner), High Zero Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music, and True/False Film and Music Festival. In 2024 Montgomery started NEA grant-funded research on drowned towns in the Southeast US for a performance project called Lake Black Town. He has recently performed with such luminary sound artists as Tatsuya Nakatani, Maria Chavez, Ben Lamar Gay, and Lisa E. Harris.
jayvemontgomery.com

Emily I. Dolan joined the faculty at Brown University in 2019. Previously, she held positions at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Dolan works on the music of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries. She focuses on issues of orchestration, timbre, aesthetics, and instrumentality, exploring in the intersections between music, science, and technology. She has published articles in Current Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, Eighteenth-Century Music, Studia Musicologica, Keyboard Perspectives, and 19th-Century Music. Her first book, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. In 2018, she guest edited a double issue of Opera Quarterly, "Vocal Organologies and Philologies." Outside of the 18^th century, she is also interested in Sound Art and has published in Popular Music on indie pop and ideas of kitsch. Dolan was a faculty fellow in the Penn Humanities Forum 2008-09 and in 2009-2010, Dolan was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2022, The Oxford Handbook of Timbre (2021), which Dolan co-edited with Alexander Rehding received the Ruth A. Solie Prize from the American Musicological Society. With Emily McGregor and Arman Schwartz, Dolan co-edited Sonic Circulations, Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, 1900-1960 which is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Currenlty, Dolan is finishing her second book, Instruments and Order, which explores ideas of instrumentality and is working on a new project on timbre and "timbrelessness."

Paja Faudree is a linguistic anthropologist whose research interests include language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, the ethnohistory of New World colonization, and the global marketing of indigenous rights discourses, indigenous knowledge, and plants. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Brown following a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is affiliated with Brown's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and Development Studies. Professor Faudree teaches courses on language and society, social movements in Latin America, language and politics, language and music, and the anthropology of drugs. She is also a published poet and playwright, and holds an MFA from Brown's literary arts program.

Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta  philosophies. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performances, instrument building, wearable artwork, poetry, books, interactive installations, and more. Her work has been included in publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), and The Funambulist. Her award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines” and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) were featured on the cover of Canadian Art. Kite has been working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013. Her artwork and performance have been featured at numerous venues, including the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS122, Anthology Film Archives, Chronus Art Center, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Honors include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellowship, which allowed her to collaborate with top experimental artists and develop a film with AI techniques, Fever Dream (2021); Women at Sundance |Adobe Fellowship; and Common Field Fellowship, among others. In fall 2022, she gave a talk at Bard as part of the Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives conference, hosted by the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a three-year project that proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies approach to revitalize the undergraduate American Studies Program.

BFA, California Institute of the Arts; MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School, Bard College; PhD candidate, Concordia University. At Bard since 2023.

kitekitekitekite.com

Eryk Salvaggio is a blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist. He has curated exhibitions, published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the international level. He is a researcher on AI, art and education at the metaLab (at) Harvard University, the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, and a fellow and top contributor to Tech Policy Press. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University, and will pursue a PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2025.

Named a “respected AI researcher” in The New Yorker, his work has been cited in pieces with The Atlantic, Wired, BBC4, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, ArtForum, NBC News, Neural, Dirty, Mute Magazine, and Outland.

Art, Design & Technology

Eryk’s work examines the relationships between systems, power, and technology, particularly in generative AI. Art is a means of finding unique insights into techno-social assemblages, and his writing on art and tech has appeared in academic journals such as Leonardo, Communications of the ACM, IMAGE, and Patterns. Since 2001, his award-winning work has been shown at the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Bunjil Place (Australia), the CVPR Art Gallery, Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive,  and at various film festivals. His work is referenced in numerous publications, including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Martha Langford’s Image & Imagination.

cyberneticforests.com
@cyberneticforests

Mack Hagood is Professor of Media and Communication at Miami University and producer/host of the long-running sound studies podcast Phantom Power. He writes on subjects such as tinnitus, noise-canceling headphones, the noise of fans in NFL football stadiums, indie rock in Taiwan, the ontology of punch sounds in film, and podcasting as public scholarship. Hagood is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control (Duke UP, 2019). His current book project, The End of Listening: What We Lose When We Cancel Noise, is under contract with Penguin Press. Hagood was named a 2024 Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
mactrasound.com/