Conference Agenda

What are qualitative researchers in the social sciences to do with and about sound? Is the goal to be “sounders of the depths” (Stengers and Pignarre, 2011), reading and revealing the social via sound? Should this be our task? In the last decade or so, with the influence of sound studies, interest has grown to include more experimental, ecological, and posthuman understandings of sound. These call our attention to how sound circulates, foregrounding “the relationship between sound and the social production of meaning” (Kelman, 2010). What does this look like in the context of the qualitative study of work?

In this paper, we reflect on the generative “noise” of sound work. We are all part of Work-Life Canada – a multi-media, multi-disciplinary project that explores the meaning of work through the juxtaposition of documentary photography, work-life stories, and sounds of work. In this large undertaking, our team members make decisions every day that move us toward, and sometimes away from, a coordinated inquiry of the working lives of Canadians. In this presentation, we reflect on the ethical, epistemological, and methodological “decision trails” (Cheek, 2004) around the use, analysis, and integration of sound in our work. We focus especially on three kinds of decision points in our use of sound: recording, manipulating, and tagging. We consider these decisions within the broader context of the project, i.e. in relation to image and word, and as we create a complex web collection featuring 100 different working people across Canada. Our aim here is not to offer techniques or technical advice, but rather, to reflect on the “noise” around these decisions and the emerging possibilities of where the sound will take us.

There continues to be discussion about what it means to do qualitative research inwiththrough sound in ways that present such processes and possibilities as novel are strong arguments that miss critical positions due to disciplinary framings (e.g., Paine, 2017), or are rooted in scholarship that continues the ocular framings central to all qualitative research (including postqualitative, posthumanist research). This proposed paper addresses three central concerns of this particular combination of argumentation and its constituent parts for sonic qualitative researchers and then productively employed to underscore the strength of sonic qualitative research.

First and foremost are questions of a qualitative methodologist’s ethical commitments. In conceptualizing sound “as part of qualitative research” without the time and critical attentions required, one often recolonizes the sonic twice: erased using visual understandings to consider sounds and again because qualitative analyses are usually ocular from their epistemologies to ethics (e.g., Behar, 1997; see McKittrick, 2021)

Second, positioning sounds in qualitative research as something new attenuates the depth and breadth of scholarship about sounds from the continually-evolving studies within and across peoples and cultures throughout millennia. Such positioning is also ironically problematic as it reasserts a particular kind of status quo (e.g., Anglo, male, wealthy, straight, etc) much of critical qualitative researchers seek to interrupt with and through our studies. Just as key positivist concepts are inappropriate for qualitative researchers, so too are ocular framings of sounds.

Finally, such combinations as noted in the introductory paragraph above often lend themselves to scholarship that is less equipped to use the sonic as a mode of analysis at any layer of scale. This is because attending to ecologies and the things that comprise them as things to observe regularly precludes centering listening as is mandatory in any form of sonic scholarship.

In this paper, we explore how techniques such as sampling, effects, and loops can disrupt the normativity of music education. Using Chick Corea’s CHEAP BUT GOOD ADVICE FOR MAKING MUSIC IN A GROUP, we discuss data from three international projects with children and young people to show how a posthuman attention to music technology fosters inclusive, relational creativity.

Music production can generate sounds that do not pre-exist (Fisher, 2013). Yet traditional music education often encourages students to reproduce sounds imagined by teachers within Western frameworks (Stover, 2025), reinforcing an artificial divide between sound and its material-human conditions (Cooke, 2024). Research also notes teacher anxiety around generalist music teaching and music technology (Hennessy, 2000, 2017).

Our study draws from three projects in Norway, Spain, and England, focused on free improvisation, virtual instrument design, and research-creation. Each explored how research unfolds through, alongside, and within music-making. Methods included field notes, audio/video recordings, performative community (Hovde, 2024), and music creation as method (Shannon, 2021).

We analyze material relations in technologically mediated music creation and how they shift through listening. Following Fisher, these shifts appear as “cracks in the simulation”: the recorded sound gestures to a lost time, its imperfections revealing temporal folds between past and present. Children displayed fascination, creativity, frustration, and boredom as samples tapped into prior moments. These encounters show how children’s engagements with sound recording spark creativity and identity exploration, challenging music education’s focus on technique and replication.

This paper explores how doing research where listening to local sonic practices, relations, global power hierarchies and to ourselves can momentarily or enduringly destabilize dominant global hierarchies—such as colonial legacies, contemporary imperialism, global racism, and capitalism—and support artistic spaces towards equity (Sayers 2016).

Drawing on postqualitative and performative methodologies we dig into our own practices of care (Christopher, de Tantillo og Watson 2020, hooks 2013), local concepts (Hovde 2019) and sonic expressions to understand when the global power-hierarchies disturb our work (Tuck og Yang 2012,, and when we do not care.

Our methodological approach is grounded in collaborative work where music, dance, and dialogic encounters are performative acts of care. We ask: How can care, and performative modes of engaging with sound, movement, and conversation, support the creation of equitable and balanced relations within collaborative practices?

Our research foregrounds the processual, affective, and relational dimensions of knowledge-making. We position artistic practice in a variety of formats as central modes of inquiry.

We try to show how we are using listening-practices, co-creation, traditional concepts of humanity and relational care to foster ethical and equitable research relations. These practices do not offer simple solutions to systemic injustices, but they can generate micro-moments of resistance and reconfiguration—and help us to understand how structural power-dynamics can be met working in arts education and artistic practices, and how we can learn to produce knowledge as research inside these.