Abstract

As co-convenors we aim to question ‘how human and more-than-human sounds, via any medium, can be put to work to seek out affective intensities – making seemingly invisible data visible’. As emerging scholars, we have been presented with a myriad of pathways to explore feminist, new materialist, posthuman and post qualitative theories, with multiple entry and exit points. The complexity of this can be overwhelming and we want to provide support to other early career researchers, to inspire confidence to think-otherwise about what constitutes data. Using the provocation of music, an entry point to think~with and make~with theory, we invite delegates to share songs to explore affect, building a collective visitation through an intra-active Spotify playlist. Thinking soundscape-affect-otherwise the take-away playlist, a collective, resonant shifting and multiplying sonic sensorium, opens potentialities to disrupt linear thinking by acting as an entry point for our collaborators to make sense of their post-qualitative inquiries and what counts as data.

Historically privilege has been bestowed upon linguistics yet here we re-imagine voice as multi-dimensional that is an ‘emergent and unpredictable process… intertwining of discursive, ideological and soci-omaterial relations’ (Chadwick, 2020, p. 1) as ‘an enactment of forces and not all necessarily human’ (Mazzei, 2016, p. 153). We recognise more-than-human bodies are saturated with emotions that feed a proliferation of affective intensities creating a rupture to ‘imagine what else might be going on’ (Leander and Bolt, 2012, p. 22), enabling us to think differently about how bodies might speak. Through relational ontologies we argue music is not separate from the human, but something that our bodies are already in relationship with, a ‘sonic flow’ that affects us (Marti Perez, 2019:159). As such, more-than-human voice is repositioned as constituent to any agentic assemblage (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017). Music as soundscapes, can be a carrier that enables an attunement to profound experiences according to Wozalek (2018). Thinking with the sonic, brings notions of ‘reverberation, echo, medium, relation of production and consumption’ that are useful for theoretical analysis (Gershon and Applebaum, 2018, 357). As Gallagher et al (2018) remind us, sound is always more than symbolic communication. Therefore, songs are ‘exterior objects … that …can haunt and influence us in much the same manner as past memories and actual experiences’ (Elsaesser and Hagener, 2015, p.180).

By drawing on Taylor’s (2021, p. 235) notion of visitations and the removal of doors we position songs as visitors that are sometimes ‘uninvited…the one who, or that which, brings what is difficult, unforeseen, unknown and unanticipateable – a something to reckon with’. In this sense we are aiming to speculatively explore the affect of musicality to consider previously unconnected features that can affect and be affected, seeking out the ‘and…and…and’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.25) in research. Polyvocal mediums have offered us an unbridled way to think with theory our invitation to remove the doors is a provocation, within collegial and resonant post-qualitative theory-practice spaces, to be accountable for the cuts we are making in research as an ethical imperative of neomaterialism.