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Sonic Coagulations: Speakers and Public Broadcasts’ Roles in Recent Turkish Acoustic Ecologies
Abstract
Within and beyond the 1950s environmental framework, global awareness towards the anthropogenic environmental impact and risk has stimulated critical discussions of the interrelations of human, nature, and material productive forces with an expansion of planetary scale place imaginaries. This includes changes of the governmental politics towards the sense of place and formalization of citizenship rights, interlaced with eco-anxieties contingent on political ecology as multiplicity, which condition the propositions of cosmopolitan identity of the human and humanistic definitions generally associated with imaginaries such as Global North that fail in the detailed regional analyses. Parallel to the global transformation of place and risk societies, Türkiye has been dealing with environmental risks that transform its ecologies in broader political and acoustic senses, as seen in changing communicational roles of mosque speaker systems and public broadcasts, as well as in music and sound culture from historical motives generating alternatives leading to bans and other forms of decline. Despite that sound is manifested as multiplicity, historical and recent discourses of sound, soundscapes, and media have remained contingencies of national singular narratives and monophonies in the Turkish context, while the political and economic fluctuations provide instability for ideological abstract proposals attached to the politics of sound. By attending to sound as rhizomatic multiplicities in soundscapes along with the changing environmental definitions of sense of place, in this paper, I examine post-Covid-19 speaker systems in public broadcasts interlaced with industry, environmental risk, and silences with a primary focus of central Anatolia and mosques’ central broadcasting systems. I will analyze large-scale environmental risks and examine the various roles of speaker systems in social and industrial practices in broader Türkiye through comparative case studies. I will further analyze acoustic ecologies through the July 14 (2016) soundscape of major urban centers preventing the coup d’etat and auditory refrains’ role in constructing communal imaginaries enfolded around inter- and intra-nationality to present ongoing modern silences, narratives of identity, and divisions in belonging. I will discuss the fundamental question of why a particular acoustic ecology is recognized in monophonies that are representative of acoustic ecology and place imaginary independent of forces in a material sense. Sound’s and auditory media cultures’ definitive terms, which are conventionally dichotomized in Kantian terms of conceptual-communicational and agreeableness, in non-provincialized Western discourses with their technical advancements’ convoluted contributions to silences and the reduction of voices in regional manifestations will be further scrutinized in this paper.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Communications
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Anatolia
Europe
Mediterranean Countries
Turkey
Sub Area
None