September 29, October 6 and 13, 2025 | 2 pm – 6 pm | João Branco Amphitheater | Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro
Admission is free and in person, but prior registration is required via email: ssardo@ua.pt
Specialization module
The sound archive and its metamorphoses: ruptures, ambiguities, and challenges
Miguel A. García | CONICET; Universidade de Buenos Aires
The most recent changes associated with sound technology — such as the transition from analogue to digital systems and the global interconnection of computers enabled by the emergence of the Internet — have led to profound transformations in the management and use of sound archives. This Specialisation Module offers a critical journey guided by ethnomusicological and anthropological approaches. It begins with the debates that have taken place since the 1960s in the Humanities and Social Sciences around the concept of the archive — commonly referred to as the “archival turn” — and continues with the conceptual and practical changes that have emerged around the sound archive in its conversion to the digital/virtual environment. In light of recent research, the consequences of changes in practices of storing, distributing, and listening to sound recordings will be discussed. Within this context, the module will address the emergence of new actors, processes of platformisation and softwarisation, the modular nature of the sound file and its capacity for aggregation and disaggregation, the powers that turn it into a commodity, counter-obsolescence practices that seek to reduce existing inequalities in access to sound in the so-called Global South, as well as the relationships between institutional, commercial, and personal sound archives.
Miguel A. García | PhD in Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires. He works as Principal Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET – Argentina) and as Consulting Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He is the director and editor of El oído pensante, an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the epistemology of music and sound studies, which he founded in 2013. He served as president of the Argentine Musicological Association and was a member of the Executive Board of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD). His most recent book is titled Los archivos de las (etno)musicologías: Reflexiones sobre sus usos, sentidos y condición virtual (editor, 2023, Berlin). His research interests include the theory and epistemology of sound archives, the sonic universe of the Internet, and the musical practices of the Indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco and Tierra del Fuego.