A proposal for a radio project on the diffusion of world music in the
digital age, focusing on the concept of “seismographic sound”.
The publication Music as Seismographic Sound / Tracking Down the Idea
of Cultural Translation is a written radio pitch by Ania Mauruschat,
closely following musicians in bi- or multi-lingual cultural contexts.
Ania Mauruschat is a radio journalist who has produced several
features on sound art, with the German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk,
and the Swiss national radio station SRF.
The written pitch comes in the form of an appendix of source materials,
including excerpts from interviews with selected musicians.
“Music is the fastest traveling medium. As some scholars like to argue, it
even might have a seismographic potential. Thus, the Swiss ethnomusicologist
Thomas Burkhalter speaks of "seismographic sounds" regarding the rather new
phenomenon of global digital "world music 2.0". This musical phenomenon
developed predominantly in the urban centres of the "Global South"—São
Paulo, La Paz, Lagos, Cape Town, Jakarta, Beirut or Manila—, long before it
drew the attention of journalists and researchers from the "Global North" in
the early 2000s. [...]
To scrutinize and better understand this situation of in-betweenness, the
radio feature will focus exemplary on two very distinct and yet similar case
studies of seismographic sound generating hubs: firstly, the label Outhere
Records, which is based in Munich, Germany and serves as a platform
especially for the young Pan-African scene of world music 2.0; and secondly,
the label Aakuluk Music in Iqaluit, Nunavut, the northernmost territory of
Canada, which is devoted to developing the young musical scene in the Arctic
to facilitate the search for identity and independence of the Inuit
musicians in their postcolonial reality of community building.”
Ania Mauruschat is a German literary and media scholar and lecturer
focusing on
radio and
radio art research. Trained as a journalist and as an editor and educated
in the humanities and social sciences, she worked from 2002 to 2012
full-time for the press and public radio stations. Mainly she was
reporting about the ramifications of digitization on media, art, sciences
and literature. This lead to a special research and work collaboration
with the radio drama & media art department of the Bavarian
broadcasting station Bayern2 (BR), amongst others resulting in the 15 part
interview series “Suchmaschine wissen macht” (2007/08).
From 2003 to 2004 she cooperated for the Bavarian broadcasting station
with the chair “Experimental Radio” at Bauhaus University Weimar (Germany)
and from 2009 to 2011 she was a member of the Munich research group of the
international and interdisciplinary research collaboration “Gegenwelten /
Counterworlds” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich). From 2012
to 2015 she worked as a scientific assistant, lecturer and project manager
at the University of Basel (Switzerland). Since October 2017 she is
elected speaker of the consortium Auditive Culture & Sound Studies of
the German Society of Media Studies. Since January 2018 she is a member of
the doctoral programme “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices” at the
Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, Switzerland. She is finishing a PhD at the
English Department of the University of Basel, it's working
title being “Radiophonics, Noise & Understanding. Towards an
Epistomology of Radio Art”.
Her main fields of interest are the transnational medium radio and
electronic art, especially radio art as one of the oldest and most
innovative and flexible electronic art forms.
