Provoke!: Digital Sound Studies

Provoke! creates a home for creative-critical projects by makers, documentary artists, and sound scholars whose work presses at the boundaries of scholarship. Envisioned as 'provocations' to existing forms of publication, these projects relate to one another through their deep engagement with sonic materials and innovative formal presentation. Rather than drawing from a particular historical period, culture, methodology, or set of aesthetic objects, Provoke! collects a series of processual explorations connected through an ethos of play, experimentation, and social interaction. Because of their sonically inspired, collaborative nature, many of these projects fall outside the purview of traditional academic publishing, yet each one offers a critical contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the future of sound studies and digital humanities.

The digital turn provides an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the forms through which scholars and artists communicate. The editors, known collectively as Soundbox, wish to see audio material featured more abundantly and creatively in scholarly settings. At the heart of our collaboration is a bold aspiration to hear sound used as a primary means of knowledge production. Accordingly, we have designed this website to privilege the auditory experience. Each Provoke! project is formally unique: some have digital spaces of their own and others are contained entirely within this website. The contributors document the ideas and processes that went into the creation of their pieces, with the goal of empowering others to experiment with audio-based scholarship.