In this article Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Jane Laverty discuss Jean-Luc Nancy's conception of listening as presented in his seminal work, "À l'écoute." The authors argue that Nancy uses the term "listening" to refer to the experience of coming to an idea of sound(s) initially encountered as puzzling. They illustrate…

Inspired by Graham Harman's philosophy of human access, and within the 'flattening ontology' of Object Oriented Ontology, Ring o' Roses is speculated about as a finite object with ontological independence from humans, repertoire, song, utility, and cultural context. Ring o' Roses playfully dances us through an introduction to OOO, and on to the…

We reexamine the approximate formula for the path difference in the double-slit interference experiment, establish its limits of applicability from a geometric perspective and discuss its validity for the two-source interference of acoustic and surface waves.

This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls 'viable ignorance', attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's 'positive ignorance'. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of…

With the development of internet technology, big data has been used to evaluate the singing and pronunciation quality of vocal students. However, current methods have several problems such as poor information fusion efficiency, low algorithm robustness, and low recognition accuracy under low signal-to-noise ratio. To address these issues, this…

The most important question for anyone born in London is 'Are you a Cockney?' Only those born within the sound of Bow bells can truthfully answer the question with a resounding 'yes.' 'Cockney' is a term of pride in the heart of the East End, an area recently made internationally famous to a new audience due to the global success of the TV series…

This article presents a close ethnographic reading of an intercultural community choir's experience recording lullabies in a professional studio setting. Bringing together Chadwick's (2020, 2021) posthuman voice analytics with interdisciplinary voice studies, I turn ethnographic ears to the voice-as-vocalised by attuning to its materialities and…

In 1952, John Cage wrote "4'33"" which famously asked the performer not to play a single note: "tacet." This provocative work raises a number of questions. In music--and by extension, music education--what does it mean to not do something? What does it mean to make no sound? More fundamentally, what is the nature of…

This article explores bells, and objects in general, from a philosophical perspective. More specifically, it explores the way objects orient our being, but only partially as aspects of things always remain withdrawn from access. Through an exploration of the elemental forms of bells, this article positions object exploration as a wholly spiritual…

Beryl Gilroy (1924-2001) is often referred to as one of the first Black primary school headteachers in London, England. Her refusal to continue teaching in schools once she reached her fifties has not been explored in recent publications. Her interest in sound, pedagogy and therapeutic recovery can be revisited retrospectively. She strove to…

The typical sound of George Lucas' laser blaster in the "Star Wars" series is well known. What does a laser blaster in "Star Wars" sound like, and why? Here we show a simple way to produce this sound by using low-cost lab material, like a spring or a Slinky. Building on the work of Crawford, who analyzed the sound of a Slinky…

This highly novel book provides an exploration of the role of silence in the school setting and interrogates the value of silence and quiet in contemporary educational practices, looking at pedagogies and classroom practice to guide this increasingly popular subdiscipline of the history of education. Arguably the first contribution written in…

This article aims is to explore a perspective of the ontology of becoming, that makes it possible to study the emergence of phenomena and thereby broaden the understanding of how knowledge is created. It is written in close connection with research in posthumanism and new materialism. What hat has been lacking in these perspectives has been a…

The Society of Music Analysis report indicated that digital music often sits uncomfortably within a curriculum where the main focus is on the non-digital. This article takes as its starting point a broad definition of digital music as both a type of music and a way that music is represented. It will examine how digital music has altered the music…

This paper argues that the teaching of art in Higher Educational Institutions is inherently paradoxical. Informed by the transgressive and interdisciplinary qualities of contemporary artistic practices, education nevertheless is often made to fit into a reductionist, outcome-oriented and individualistic discourse. Taking a weeklong workshop at the…