Steven Feld

Steven Feld is an anthropologist, filmmaker, sound artist/performer, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. After studies in music, film, and photography, he received the Ph.D in Anthropological Linguistics at Indiana University in 1979. From 1976 he began a research project in the Bosavi rainforest of Papua New Guinea. Results include the monograph Sound and Sentiment (republished 2012 in a 3rd and 30th anniversary edition), a Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dicitionary, and essays, some published in his co-edited books Music Grooves and Senses of Place. From this work he also produced audio projects including Voices of the Rainforest. Key theoretical themes developed in this work are the anthropology of sound and voice; acoustemology, particularly regarding eco-cosmology as relational ontology; emotive sensuality; and experimental, dialogic writing, recording, and filmmaking. Work after 2000 has concentrated on related themes in the study of bells in Europe, Japan, Ghana, and Togo, published in CDs, DVDs, and books like The Time of Bells, Skyros Carnival, and Santi, Animali, e Suoni. His most recent project concerns jazz in West Africa, published in the twelve CD, five DVD, and book set Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra. Feld’s work has been supported and honored by MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships as well as book and film prizes.

Makis Solomos

Born in Greece and living in France, Makis Solomos is Professor of musicology at the University Paris 8 and director of the research team MUSIDANSE. His book From Music to Sound. The Emergence of Sound in 20th- and 21st-Century Music (Routledge, 2019) deals with an important mutation of today’s music. His new book Towards an Ecology of Sound. Environmental, Mental and Social Ecologies in Music, Sound Art and Artivisms (Routledge, 2023) deals with an enlarged notion of ecology, mixing environmental and socio-political issues. He is also one of the main Xenakis’ specialists. His forthcoming book is entitled Habiter (avec) Xenakis / Dwelling (with) Xenakis. His new research field is music and degrowth and he is also developing a project on the island of Gyaros, a land of political exile in the past and now under the protection of WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature).