This article is structured around snapshots of everyday life in reception centres for asylum seekers. These set the tone of the sonic and affective dimensions of the experience of the centre, as narrated by a resident, a music teacher, and through ethnographic reflections. The article devises ‘voice’ as a distinct category of the sonic spectrum, imbued with the significance of testifying to human existence, in a twofold way: first as a theoretical lens that offers new perspectives on the asylum seekers’ paradigm, and second, as a methodological tool to gain insights into aspects of everyday life in a reception centre, and by extension gaining access into ‘other’ social worlds that would otherwise remain concealed.

Who gets to have a voice, and what does it mean? Questions of vocal ontology and ethics are perennial, but in a world where the ability to sample the voices of others or to synthesize new ones in pursuit of both creative and commercial endeavours is available more widely than ever before, the relationship of the voice to the individual body, agency, and rights is invested with a new urgency. Through a discussion ranging from The Little Mermaid to Kanye West, Cathy Berberian to Holly Herndon, this short provocation considers the manifold ways in which we find, have, and borrow voices.

This introduction to the round table attempts an overview of the conceptualizations of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’. It maintains a dialogic balance between the novel insights offered by each contribution’s topic and the authors’ distinct angles, and current debates around voice and agency. The introduction interweaves philosophical, anthropological, and, of course, (ethno)musicological approaches to the vocal phenomenon, highlighting its complex dimensions as well as its dense intersubjective meaningfulness. If ‘listening’ is the counterpart of ‘voicing’, integral to its very materialization, ‘vocal agency’ urges us to think beyond the interconnection between the vocalizer and the listener, shifting our focus of attention to the capacity of the voice to offer insights into and through itself.

This article conceptualises voice as a constellation, examining how objects, images, and sounds (or their absence) speak to the lived experiences of displacement. Drawing from a British Academy-funded project with a Syrian artist collective and a women-led social entrepreneurship initiative in Istanbul, we explore the affective assemblages of loss, belonging, and forced displacement through an ethnographic mode of listening. Bringing together a crocheted life jacket, a painting, and a piece of music that cannot be played, we consider how a politics of listening can offer new ways of understanding forced displacement and agency beyond voice as speech or narrative. We advocate for an approach that foregrounds thick solidarity, collective expression, and intersubjective relations of vocality.

The documentation of sound art installation has received scant research attention. This ARTICLE investigates the sensory experience of spatial audio recordings of two sound art installations: Écosystème(s) by Estelle Schorpp and Générateur Stochastique by Jean-Pierre Gauthier. Interactive listening sessions WERE CONDUCTED with participants from different fields of expertise: sound artists, sound engineers, new media and sound art curators, and new media and sound art conservators. Listening sessions were followed by semi-structured interviews questioning the selection of significant positions in time and space in the recordings. The analysis revealed a broad range of listening strategies which expand the literature on documentation frameworks. This research shows the potential for methodologically including the sensory experience in the documentation of sound art installations and discusses the use of spatial recording as a tool for the specification of documentation in a multi-expertise context.

The increasing number of applications for spatial audio technologies has led to a growing interest in the subject from academic institutions and a more capillary diffusion of techniques and practices to non-institutional contexts, especially independent sound artists. However, the lack of a methodology for learning these technologies motivated our team to develop the Open Ambisonics Toolkit (OAT). Our goal is to promote the diffusion of spatial audio technologies by combining three pedagogical components: a DIY approach to hardware, a selection of open-source software, and a step-by-step introduction to Ambisonics theory through practical applications. The present article focuses on the development of a flexible toolkit and is based in our own practical experience as sound artists and teachers. We describe the process of designing hardware and selecting software components, and report results from objective measurements and listening tests conducted to evaluate different loudspeakers and spatial configurations. To conclude, we discuss future perspectives on the development of tutorials for learning spatial audio with OAT, which we are continually testing in workshop settings with students and independent sound artists.

At present, in music education scholarship, there is a renewed interest and enthusiasm in materiality motivated by theories that gather under the title of ‘New Materialism’. Beyond the field of music education, doubts and reservations towards new materialism are being discussed, but these discussions are not yet entering music education debates. There are reservations concerning the lack of continuity with ‘old’ materialisms, some internal inconsistencies within the theories, problems that arise when new materialist concepts of agency and decentring are applied, and propositions that new materialism is not emancipatory, as claimed, but represents a further twist of Neoliberalism.

This article surveys spatial music and sonic art influenced by the traditional Japanese concept of ma – translated as space, interval, or pause – against the cultural backdrop of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism. Works by Jōji Yuasa, Midori Takada, Michael Fowler, Akiko Hatakeyama, Kaija Saariaho and Jim Franklin created in conscious engagement with ma are analysed with respect to diverse manifestations of ma in Japanese arts and social sciences, including theatre, poetry, painting, rock garden, shakuhachi and psychotherapy. Jean-Baptiste Barrière provided the Max patch for Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains (2015) for this survey. I propose a framework of six interlinking dimensions of ma – temporal, physical, musical, semantic, therapeutic and spiritual – for discussing creative approaches to ma, alongside their resonance with Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s seven interconnected characteristics of Zen art: Asymmetry, Simplicity, Austere Sublimity/Lofty Dryness, Naturalness, Subtle Profundity/Deep Reserve, Freedom from Attachment and Tranquility. The aim is first to examine how each composer uses different techniques, technologies and systems to engage with specific dimensions of ma. Second, to illuminate possible futures of exploring these dimensions in spatial music and sonic art through three methods: Inspiration, Transmediation and Expansion.

Almost 100 years ago, Fats Waller recorded some of the most unique songs of his career: stride tunes on pipe organ. Operating out of Victor’s state-of-the-art Camden, New Jersey Studio—a former Baptist church—Waller recorded both solo and group recordings on the instrument, all of which were published in the company’s mainstream “popular” series. Such a designation was rare for Black musicians, who, in this era, were traditionally relegated to making “race records.” However, despite Waller’s inclusion in its popular series, Victor still intentionally limited his musical output, maintaining similar stylistic restrictions to those they placed on other Black performers within the race record designation.

Even though Waller had a well-known love of classical music, he was expressly not allowed to record these works. Instead, he was given the difficult task of adapting the quick-striking sound of stride to the pipe organ, an adjustment that posed multiple technical and logistical challenges. Building on the work of Paul S. Machlin, Brian Ward, and Allan Sutton, I argue that Waller’s pipe organ recordings not only provide further insight into the racial logic of the early recording industry, but that they also demonstrate how that logic restricted Black musicians’ ability to sonically and instrumentally experiment within the jazz idiom. Ultimately, Waller’s story encapsulates many of the larger discriminatory practices that Black musicians faced during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, while, at the same time, these records highlight a side of Black music making that is often overlooked in accounts of the era.

Women writers from the peripheries and semiperipheries of Europe who participated in the metropolitan melting pots of new ideas at the fin de siècle are often marginalized or excluded in historiographical accounts, making their contributions to a European cultural heritage invisible.1 This marginalization, shared by numerous women playwrights and artists, prompts the need to explore ways of providing a fair account of their contributions. Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849–92) was one of these women who set out on a European journey to try her luck with an international career. In this essay I explore her contribution to the late nineteenth-century London avant-garde with her play Sanna kvinnor (1883) [True Women, 1892].2 The application of any quantitative method, or those that rely solely on the translation, staging, publication, and reviews of actual plays, would likely obscure rather than illuminate the reception of her work. To contextualize the reception of Leffler’s play, it is necessary to adopt a theoretical perspective that integrates the political and the artistic, while also considering Leffler’s status as a foreign playwright in Britain. Furthermore, the pattern of reception requires theoretical conceptualization and evaluation in line with the social and cultural position of women at the time. In the case of Leffler, this conceptualization should consider the reception of her embodiment of the New Woman together with her contribution to theatre as part of the endeavors of a personal network marked by blurred boundaries between the private and the public, as well as between life, politics, and art.3