Key Concepts
These terms outline how we have approached sound, media art, perception, and presence, and how sonic experiences connect us to imagined pasts, possible futures, and what cannot be seen.
Listening changes how we see the world around us. —K.O.
Our work offers art experiences as a way to reflect on power, presence, and perception.—M.O.
We are trying to experience what the sounds hold. ... As Keith said to me earlier “change the air.” - M.O.
Concepts like Acousmatic Blackness and Social Filters help us explore how identity and access are shaped through sound and systems. —M.O.
Acousmatic Blackness
Acousmatic sound is a sound for which the source is not visualized. In the late 1990s, Mendi Obadike coined the term “acousmatic blackness” to describe the reading of a sound as “black” when the source of the sound is not visible. Think of hearing off-screen music in a film scene, or listening to a voice over a public address system. During this period we began speaking about the pleasures and pains of “acousmatic blackness” as we watched films, listened to transcendent hip-hop tracks, made sound art, and created artworks for the internet. Mendi explored this notion of reading race through sound when it is separated from the image in her dissertation Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound (2005). This term, “acousmatic blackness”, has since been taken up by musicologists, cultural critics, film scholars, artists, and many others. The concept (of a sound with representational possibilities and an incorporeal source) has been an important area of investigation in our work from the beginning of our practice. — K.O.
Social Filters
After years of working with analog and digital filters for signal processing, I began to consider how similar processes operate in systems of social control. Early in our career I began using the term social filter to describe what we observed happening in society, and to name the mechanisms we sought to reveal, subvert, and critique through our art. In our work, social filters are structures that permit or deny access to particular identities within physical and digital environments. This concept has shaped our practice for more than two decades. - K.O.
Ephemeral Inheritances
When we go into the archive, we are often looking for what we call ephemeral inheritances—things that are not tangible but that the archive points toward, often music, myths, or sonic culture. These sounds, stories, and songs carry information and feeling that move through time. When we work with freedom songs or folk songs from the African American or Igbo tradition, we think of them as seeds that have to be planted, grown and then planted again. They come from the past but need our voices now. Engaging with these inheritances is a way of changing the air, listening for what the sounds hold, and keeping them alive through re-performance and re-activation. - M.O.