SOUNDING OUT 4 - An International Symposium on Sound in the Media

4-6 September, 2008 – University of Sunderland, UK

Sounding Out will return to the University of Sunderland’s Media Centre in September 2008, hosted by the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies. The conference aims to promote links and dialogue between practitioners, students and academics concerned with SOUND as communication, entertainment and creative practice across various media: including film, radio, television, video, audio-books, electro-acoustic music, sonic art, new digital media and computer games. Sounding Out 4 is particularly interested in the twin themes of sound and memory, sound and history but these are by no means exclusive and the debate is expected to be as wide-ranging and forward-looking as on previous occasions.

The conference will include a selection of keynote speakers drawn from a variety of media (theory and practice), presentations of audio and audio-visual work, plus 14 panels of papers by delegates (a total of 40 papers).

Keynote presentations will be given by:

Simo Alitalo
Finnish Sound Sculptor

Ira Bhaskar
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Neil Brand
Playwright, radio dramatist, author, silent film accompanist & film music composer.

Richard Dyer
Professor of Film, Kings College London. His books include Stars (1979), Now You See It (1990), Only Entertainment (1992), White (1997) and Pastiche (2007).

Sean Street
Professor of Radio, Bournemouth University, radio poet & producer, author of A Concise History of British Radio (2002).

Hildegard Westerkamp
Vancouver-based composer and sound ecologist, a key member of the World Soundscape Project in the mid-seventies, a founder member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), and co-editor of Soundscape – The Journal of Acoustic Ecology.

Organizers: Nick Cope - Christine Gledhill – Peter M Lewis – Caroline Mitchell – Chris Priestman - Gianluca Sergi – Martin Shingler – Ulrike Sieglohr