Exploring Soniclifeworlds Across Disciplines and Abilities: Histories, Theories, and Models of Practice

• In Event: Exploring the Sonic in Music Teaching & Learning

Abstract

Attending to the ‘sensory turn’ (Howes, 2005, 2022, 2023) across the academy and drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies, a growing cohort of music education scholars are exploring sound and sensuous scholarship in their research and teaching practice (Abramo, 2014, 2015; Author, 2021, 2023, 2025; Author & Murray, 2023; Friesen & Menard, 2024; González Ben, 2023; Hill, 2018; Kerchner, 2014; McRae, 2021; Recharte, 2019; Author A & Author B, 2021, Author A, 2017); Schmidt & Author, 2024; Thibeault, 2017). This reorientation has opened opportunities for students to listen and respond to their world creatively and critically, thus enacting equitable, inclusive, and socially-just pedagogies.

Part 1 of this presentation traces sound as a way of sensing, knowing and being in the world across the fields of Archaeacoustics, Sensuous Scholarship, Sound Studies, and Music Education. Echoing the troubling “rhetoric of emergence” (Blaszkiewicz, 2021), this overview delineates how and in what ways, sound and sensorial ways of knowing are in direct resonance with ancient worldview and wisdom shared through Indigenous knowledge systems (lineras, 2025). Histories, theories, and models of practice from the past that have been systematically severed and systemically subjugated due to colonial-capitalism’s perilous ploys are braiding their way back into human and more-than-human consciousness. Sound plays a significant role in how one comes to sense, search, and be in/with the world; as Brazilian indigenous leader Ailton Krenak (2023) reminds us, “Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on Earth” (p. 38).

Attending to ways of listening and responding to the “sonic commons” (Odland & Auinger, 2009), Part 2 of this presentation offers a curricular framework stemming from soniclifeworlds and improvising sonic ecologies research projects currently underway in Canada. Drawing on preliminary findings working with a university campus experiential learning program for young adults with developmental and physical disabilities, we share stories, reflections, insights, and experiences from students participating in a ten-week series of group improvisation and collaborative composition initiative called Sounds Like Us. The ninety-minute Sound Session Workshops (SSWs) include a range of activities involving sound exploration, musical play, Sonic Score Visualizations (SSVs), movement and dance, and a final showcase for families, friends, and community members.

Students’ original piece, “elements” is an extended improvisation in four tableaux. Each soundpiece (earth, air, water, fire) was inspired by their original Sonic Score Visualizations (SSVs) and are meant as sonic expressions and meditations on sustainability and engendering kinship with human and more-than-human. Challenging anthropocentrism, moving beyond dualisms, and emphasizing the intricate interconnected and interdependent web of relationships between humans and the non-human world, “elements” brings listeners into a unique aurality of amplified found sounds, live analog and digital processing, and acoustic musical instruments. Utilizing everyday hand-held technologies along with acoustic, digital, and adaptive sound and music making instruments (e.g. AUMI, KOALA, and Ableton), participants sampled, recorded, and produced original sound pieces including “elements” which received its world premiere Spring, 2025 in front of a live audience.

Author

• jashen edwards, University of Guelph