Overview
Provoke! is a digital sound studies project that is a collection of mini projects about the various ways sound is used, its presence in our everyday lives, and push the boundaries of knowledge.
Project Description
Provoke! Soundbox Project was created by a team of Darren Mueller, Mary Caton Lingold, and Whitney Trettien, who collectively are known as Soundbox, at Duke University with the help of funding from the Franklin Humanities Institute. The project is made up of seven mini sound centered projects and allows site viewers to interactively explore these projects. The seven mini projects are:
- Paperphone – An interactive audio board that manipulates the users voice in a way to “unravel the expressive potential of voice and audio.”
- We Are Your Neighbors – This project is a collection recordings from Richmond City Jail all produced and engineered music there by incarcerated and non-incarcerated every Friday.
- Finding Ibrida – A software in the making to help design and create guitars from this software known as Ibrida.
- Susurrous Scholarship – A software that translates academic articles into sound pieces, thus creating a movie like production of these articles.
- Organs of the Soul – Project that dives into the “historical and cultural frameworks that eighteenth century Parisians would’ve listen through.”
- A Tale of Two Soundscapes – An audiovisual project that tells the story of Steph Ceraso’s move from a small quiet town in the mountains of North Carolina to the loud city life of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- The Grand Rue – A collection of “city symphony of sounds” in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti three days before the catastrophic earthquake in 2010.
Each project has a unique perspective on the influence of sound and pushes the audience to experiment with audio-based scholarship.
Significance
Why is Provoke! significant to digital humanities? This project brings together many different audiences, from academic scholars, to historians and to music performers, and brings them all to one platform to share the information with. At first, Provoke! may seem confusing and an odd project, but as you make your way through the seven mini audio-based projects,you’ll begin to realize there is something for everyone. Provoke! teaches us all how much impact the power of sound has on our society. Whether it be using the power of music to help with incarcerated individuals or adjusting from living in a small town to living the city life, Provoke! shows us the complexity and importance sound has on our daily lives.
