Why are there so many sound technologies, music services and apps offering to help us look after ourselves, our families and loved ones? This talk interrogates the proliferation of “sonic surrogates” ostensibly capable of automating and enhancing the provision of care. Connecting these “promissory” technologies to sound recording’s gendered and colonial histories, and common ideological investments in aurality, Thompson suggests that sonic surrogates are emblematic of an enduring crisis of reproduction. If sonic surrogates, like other sound technologies, are social relations ‘all the way down’, then how might these be exposed, reconfigured, and reimagined?
Marie Thompson is a Senior Lecturer of Popular Music at The Open University, UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sonic Surrogates: Music, Automation and the Crisis of Reproduction (UC Press, forthcoming) and, with Annie Goh, Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Goldsmiths Press, forthcoming).
