Schizophonia: A decolonial trip around the contemporary policies of aurality
(Schizophonia is a neologism coming from a complex mental illness found in the world’s population, noticed in the 2nd half of the XX century, and characterized by inconsistency produced in the ear and in the human brain by the collapse with the outside world, given their vulnerability and permanent submission to sound stimuli)
Too often, we feel in us the unexpected presence, internal and annoying, of a sound event, a kind of an audio-worm, which interrupts us from the open relationship with the sound landscape and forces us to pay attention to it, or even worse, to sing it even without desire.
Therefore, listening to this (in)desired sound evidence, this gives us the opportunity to look to our aesthetic and auditory way of getting involved with sounds and music just in order to – our first step – observe and understand the policies of aurality musically expressed by the western machine of musical industry. Our second step takes us to design a survival space-time – we will call it silence – imagining it like an act of conscious and active listening, in fact, a promoter of changes over the hearing agency.
If it is true that aurality policies emerge in our era just to expose us, in excess, to sounds transformed in a kind of entertainment wave form and, for that reason, reducing our listening experience, it is this finding that opens in us, paradoxically, the ability to understand the instrumental rationalization that western listening has been submitted. This is the reason why we walked away and why we are losing now memories of our ancestry, even losing our roots.
It’s this situation that requires us to declare a disruptive listening agenda against this policy of control and discipline that is here now, in this era of cybernetic reproducibility. We are not in favour of this shameful lucrative business of sound sameness – we dare to speak about a kind of gentrification of listening – just made by the neoliberal sound machines that music industry, so insistently, puts into the air.
In this case, with an unexpected movement, just in silence, we take ourselves to an imaginary sound territory of nobody, where it is possible to decolonize sounds, alone or in groups, proposing an undetermined sound landscape, resilient and immune to sound gentrification. It is here that we leave audio-warms in bad conditions.
Beyond the sound that lives in the narrow field of consumption, we announce another exposed auditory practice, from sound art to experimental music, where it is possible to listen to unheard sounds, to sounds that gives us the desire to listen and think about music without constraints.

Decolonization is a relevant topic in the context we live in, especially when we look and listen to the context of socio-cultural and political thinking. What we are prepared to expose reinforces the emergence of such issues in the epistemological field of artistic education. In a sense, music education should be an example of freedom, democracy, resistance and promoting agonistic relations. The presentation happens in a multitasked situation – musical performance, PowerPoint exhibition alongside with the text interpretation – that will describe the consistency of the analysis. Sound examples will be produced and heard just to confirm what has been said, creating a strong atmosphere in order to justify all the assumptions. This will provide, just like an additional analysis, handling data in order to combine results of the study.

- Important follow-up evaluation and diagnostic about the (un)presence of world-music subjects in the curricula; - Construction of sound examples scanned and assessed for the eligibility of the study; - To provide a general discussion about these results in the context of artistic research; - To expand this subject in doctoral and post-doctoral studies.

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