"Revolutions in Sound": Keynote Duet

Abstract

The authors were honoured by the invitation to present a dialogic duet keynote for the Revolutions in Sound conference beautifully imagined by Caitlin Marshall, Patricia Herrera, Marci McMahon, and Iván Ramos. Their collective generosity included not only food, travel and an honorarium but also some much-needed intellectual sustenance: they provided us with several prompts to work with for our remarks. You will find their questions in bold and our respective answers to follow. It was a moving experience of turn-taking in the live, of singing in round, rather than a masterful display of individualistic pontification. We would like to extend our infinite thanks for the organizers’ thoughtful questions and for giving us such rich soil to plant future idea seedlings. For many of us, this was our last moment of being with others before the isolation of the pandemic took hold, and it is partly for this reason we have left our remarks mostly unedited. Here they are published very much as they were delivered in the live so as to record that moment of togetherness and also remind of a polemical mode that is possible when in an actual room with others you can see, hear, and feel. There is thus a palpable sense of safety-in-experimentation in our remarks.