Posts tagged with Bangkok
Khlong Saen Saep, under Witthayu Road. image by author.
Snaking through Bangkok’s concrete tonnage are khlong, natural canals that feed into the Chao Phraya river. Many have been filled in to build roads, but there are still plenty within the city boundaries. They’re crucial for understanding Bangkok’s massive and sometimes inequitable 20th century spatial transformations.
Today is the debut of Bangkok is Ringing, a monthly podcast I’m producing for the online magazine Triple Canopy. Check it!
Image by Seth Denizen
Everything Changing Real Soon
After March 28th of this year, Weird Vibrations migrates to Bangkok, Thailand. This trip is what the blog was created for, and what all the content so far has led up to. I’ll be there for one year, writing in this space as often as possible. Whether you came to WV through another sound site, or by accident, or because you know me, I hope you’ll keep checking in.
I can promise, at least, the following in return: erudite anthropological analysis, high-fidelity stereo sound recordings and concerned photographic documentation, political insight, what I’m pretty sure are actual dragons, danger-zone maps, nicknames like “Pizza” and “Dream,” sweat, rain, noise, the nexus of Buddhism and Bohemianism, and a brand of earnestness that can only be described as avant-garde.
Here is the deal:
เดือนหน้าผมจะไปกรุงเทพฯเพื่อศึกษาวิจัยเกี่ยวกับเพลงและเสียง
แอโรบิคทางใต้สะพานลอย
สนใจในวิธีการที่เพลงและสถาปัตยกรรมที่พัฒนาร่วมกัน ยังสนใจว่าเสียงมีผลต่อผู้คนในเมือง
ถ้าคุณพูดภาษาไทยหรือถ้าคุณอาศัยอยู่ในกรุงเทพฯและสนใจในเสียงโปรดส่งผมอีเมล(datageneral@gmail.com)นะครับ เวลาผมอยู่ในกรุงเทพฯผมต้องการจะพบเพื่อนใหม่และเพื่อนร่วมงาน
เช่น
-คุณมีปัญหากับเสียงในกรุงเทพฯไหม?
-คุณมีนักดนตรีหรือไม่?
-คุณอาศัยอยู่ในเมืองนานและคุณอย่าลืมว่ามันใช้เสียง?
-คุณสนใจว่าเสียงถนนมีผลต่อชีวิตประจำวัน?
ขอบคุณครับ
The annual Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) conference starts Wednesday; look for live updates here, and via the #sem09 tag on Twitter. This material will comprise the rest of the week’s posts. Expect some combination of panel reactions, SEM celebrity gossip, and sound snippets from around Mexico City. For today, please enjoy browsing a late draft of the paper I will be presenting at the conference on Thursday. Comments and discussion are most welcome.
Apologies, incidentally, for the lack of updates over the past six days. (I got hitched.)
In the wake of the first domestic use of sound cannons, against protesters at the recent, sparsely-picketed G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which comes just a few weeks after the same technology was used to suppress protesters at a factory in Bangkok, I want to discuss sound as an absolute phenomenon – that is, at the point where a human listener experiences acute physical harm through exposure, where sound stops being musical or aesthetic and becomes quite literally indistinguishable from a blunt object or explosive device.
Sound in Bangkok
