Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye

Located within the myth of Shakespeare’s universality is a belief in the power and poeticism of his language. If we acknowledge Richard Eyre’s assertion that ‘the life of the plays is in the language’, what becomes of this myth when Shakespeare is ‘transferred’ across cultures? What happens to Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ in these cultural re-articulations? Using Ong Keng Sen’s Search Hamlet (2002), this paper examines the transference of myth and/as language in intercultural Shakespeares. It posits that intercultural imaginings of Shakespeare can be said to expose the hollow myth of universality yet in a paradoxical double-bind reify and reinstate this self-same myth.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are increasingly becoming employed in the classroom to facilitate embodied forms of experiential learning in sensorially rich contexts. This chapter presents the findings of a study conducted with 15-year-old students in a Singapore school. The study evaluated the effectiveness of IVEs as a novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of social and emotional competencies, in the context of Character and Citizenship Education; it sought to ascertain if the affordances of VR and IVEs—immersion, presence and embodiment—when accompanied by real-world narratives would facilitate greater empathy, perspective-taking and responsible decision-making. Students were divided into three treatment conditions: IVEs, “pen-and-paper” mental simulation and video-viewing, and each treatment contained a problem scenario that involved an ethical dilemma young people in Singapore today face. A quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test, non-equivalent group design was employed and the study adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. The findings show how IVEs can effectively facilitate perspective-taking and empathy, and this is due to its ability to immerse the user in the fictional space of the narrative, thereby encouraging a deeper sense of presence and embodiment.

Soundscapes engender historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic meanings through acoustical qualities that reflect a community’s lived experiences. In this article, we propose music lesson ideas that help students appreciate and embrace their sociocultural heritage—by creating, performing, and listening to soundscapes that are representative of their locality. These lesson ideas are guided by pedagogical imperatives drawn from key soundscape literature, which reveals sounds as being powerful in sculpting culture and identity as well as impacting ways of knowing. Activities in the lessons serve to develop students’ aurality and their understanding of the sociocultural connotations of sound. The learnings gained may supplement more traditional musical skills and knowledge acquisition in the music classroom.

This paper will examine the poetics of sound archiving as a means of documenting and evaluating Singapore’s cultural and political economy. It is twofold in consideration: an inquiry into sound’s significance for/in Singapore and the media/tion of archiving sound. This first concern involves an investigation of selected sound events and their relation to the cultural and political life-worlds (Lebenswelt) of Singapore/ans. The second section argues for an importance of archiving sounds in/of Singapore given the absence of any authoritative sound library or sound map. Many iconic, culturally defining sounds are now lost to time; this loss further underscores the importance of archiving for past sounds and the perception of these sounds by historical actors inform us about the changing character and identity of cities, people and cultural practices. Technology today provides the means to capture and contain sound, as ephemeral phenomena, in high fidelity and this paper will include a discussion of an ongoing research project in collaboration with the National Archives of Singapore (SoundscapeSG) which involves a web-based platform that contains Singapore soundscapes in ambisonic formats.

The paper will present the findings of a small-scale study done to ascertain Singapore’s soundmarks and the place and meaningfulness of sound in Singapore society. I critically evaluate the significance of these findings in relation to Singapore’s cultural and political economy and the population’s lived experiences. The paper will also examine sonic events that reveal how sound’s regard impacts the cultural and political lifeworlds (Lebenswelt) of Singaporeans. An oft neglected phenomenon in Singaporeans’ lived experience sound inevitably informs, influences and dictates Singapore’s social, cultural and political identity.

Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy become the means to examine a politics of the body and sound, of music on movement. Additionally, in this ‘auditory architecture’ the quanta of time, its relations and (lack of) unity are exposed. This article then examines the intersubjective interplay of movement and music, body and sonicity; it considers the resonance of the performing body as intermaterial vibration and how this invites a sonic politics of relational possibility. The article will then also investigate the ways in which the interaction of motion and music, movement and stillness engenders experiences of time's indeterminacy and elasticity.