Essay Sound: A Diasporic Making

Application summary

"Essay Sound: A Diasporic Making" is my current project to develop a new genre of critical sound-making called essay sound that is committed to ambiguity and interaction across borders. This is a practice and research project for a new methodology of sound-making that at the same time is put in conversation with existing disciplines through research of past and current artists and scholars on sound and diasporic studies. My current body of work that lays out the groundwork for essay sound include full-length sound performances that address climate change, natural and constructed environments, migratory routes, sonic imprints of war, the body in pain, and ideological sound design. A new methodology for sound-making, essay sound, like its well-established counterpart of essay film, is based on an openness to incorporate disparate material sources into a fragmented, yet coherent, whole. Generally, both genres slide between different components of text, music, and image to create internal rifts, to expose the fragility of narrative, and to blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. Specifically, essay sound absorbs, inter alia, archival material, field recordings, samples, speech fragments, and music, in order to blur the lines of reception — are we listening to a voice, a witness testimony, a foreign accent, or a spoken melody? But essay sound differs from essay film in one crucial aspect — it relocates its methodological genealogy from within a French / German tradition of 20th century cultural theory to a Global South diasporic and postcolonial conversation, with a focus on Vietnamese diasporic production. As defined by this project, essay sound is at once rooted in a diasporic lineage of plurality, and free in its open composition of disparate sources.