Mahmundi and the city: acoustic spacialities, sonorities and textualities

Abstract

Music is a mediating dispositif of sensibilities and of the weavings of reality in its textualities, performativities, and sonorities. From its conjuncture emerge recombinatory elements of the real capable of erecting, within intra and intersubjective recesses, landscapes of the self, mediated by soundscapes which, in turn, are triggered into landscapes of an image- everyday. What is reflected here are the textualities that produce soundscapes in the self- titled 2016 album by Rio de Janeiro based singer Mahmundi, considering the trajectories that her musicalities and mediations generate as a dispositif that (re)combines sound and music with the landscapes of the self and of everyday life. Its background and setting is the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ), yet it expands in reception, potentially designating any other city in its diversity. In Mahmundi (2016), an attempt is made to reconstitute the soundscape within the category of the city’s idyllic space and its passions. The methodological pathway is grounded in soundscape analysis adapted from the premises of Schafer (2001) and Vaz, Mello Vianna, and Santos (2018), which consider the type, quality, role, strategy, materiality, visuality, meanings, and representations of sounds and their landscape, taking the album as its corpus. Within the songs and musical sociability, there is an impulse to materialize, shape, and fix fleeting and vertiginous meanings of everyday life or of the production of the self within a sonorized everyday. The textualities – and sociabilities – constructed in the experience of consuming the artistic product derive from music as a mediating dispositif of reality rendered as sensitive manufacture. The subject, in its parts, finds itself whole, albeit provisionally, within the musical whole, the real whole, and the whole of the self, as Mahmundi (2016) sings and makes audible.