Tympan

Tympan is a collaboration between Emile Bojesen and Naomi Waltham-Smith (the aural flâneur), formed out of our shared interests in recent French philosophy, especially deconstruction, and in creative sonic practices. Appropriately given that our collaboration has developed through an series of conversations about listening, philosophy, education, and politics, our first joint project produced an experimental sound piece, The Limits of Conversation, which was also presented in a revised form at a recent conference on “Ethics of Conversation and Disagreement.” The piece experiments with philosophizing through sound and brings together Waltham-Smith’s field recordings with Bojesen’s sonic compositional and design practice.

Emile Bojesen works on educational philosophy with an emphasis on forms of education that exceed imposed authorities and prescriptions, particularly those which can be understood as conversational, collaborative, or passive. His scholarly interests are illustrated in part by his creative practice-as-research in electroacoustic sound design and music production which involves various collaborations, experiments, compositions, and improvisations in sound. He has recently released recordings on labels such as Line Imprint, Geräuschmanufaktur, and Outsider Art, as well as on the label, Hoopoe Industries, that he runs with Ansgar Allen. A specialist in the thought of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-François Lyotard, he has published widely in the field of educational and philosophical thought and is author of Forms of Education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy (Routledge, 2020).

Naomi Waltham-Smith, who has a background in musical performance and composition, now works at the intersection of political philosophy in the continental tradition and sound studies, straddling theory and practice. She is developing a scholarly, creative, and activist stance as a decolonial-feminist aural flâneur, as set out in her monograph Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press). She is also the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Shattering Biopolitics: Miliant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham University Press, 2021). You can find out more about her creative work, research, and writing on this site.