CURRENT PROJECTS
Risible is out 6 February, 2024!
Available as a free e-book via Open Access here
Purchase in hard copy here and here
"A virtuoso meditation on laughter, music, and sound reproduction, moving from transfixing insights drawn from philosophical texts and recorded sound objects to a bold vision of laughter as a sonorous force that troubles our conceptions of humanity and rationality. How sounds acquire meaning, how they make sense or nonsense or lie somewhere between the two: Delia Casadei's Risible considers these fundamental issues in startling and thought-provoking ways."
— Carolyn Abbate, coauthor of A History of Opera
"There is something thrillingly unclassifiable about this book. While it indexes music studies, it is clearly a profound work of cultural theory. Casadei reveals how laughter—a deceptively minor though ubiquitous phenomenon—holds relevance for every dimension of life and its biopolitical regulation via gender, race, labor, and reproduction. She also reminds us that there is much genealogical work yet to be done on mediatized, electrified soundworlds of the twentieth century and offers a powerful, welcoming push in new directions."
— Amy Cimini, author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life
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"Portrait of a Laugh," a new essay commissioned by artistic duo Masbedo for their upcoming art book, Ritratto di Città 20/20.000 Hz
I was thrilled to be a consultant, contributing writer and featured participant in Masbedo's touring video-installation Ritratto di Città. This work, featuring interview, performances, sound and video art, and a bespoke art book, is a creative re-enactment of Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna's 1955 Ritratto di città, one of their earliest works produced in Italy's first electronic music studio, the Studio di Fonologia. My essay re-visits and re-imagines the atmosphere of the Studio and the significance of the experimentations on the voice in those years through an examination of a sound that haunts the production of those years: Cathy Berberian's voice, and particularly her laughter.
Oral History and Witchcraft in Central Italy
Together with Marina Romani, I have begun a long-term examination of oral histories from the 1950s-70s of magical practices, and specifically witchcraft, in Central italy. Our first site of examination is Villa Zaccheo, in the province of Teramo, Abruzzo, which was documented by Cesare Bermani between 1959-1976 as a site where witches were said to be present and active. By working jointly on the tapes in the Archivio Cesare Bermani in Orta San Giulio, and interviewing people in Villa Zaccheo, Marina and I are asking what sound recordings can tell us about the way witches were conceived, understood, perceived and warded off in the twentieth-century. What changes when the documents of witchcraft become aural rather than written, as was the case with the infamous witch-hunts of the counter-reformation? What does economic and industrial development have to do with the way witches were known at the times of these oral histories? In the twentieth-century, what does it mean to know a witch and be known by a witch by ear?
"Towards an Acoustemology of Witches," Sound Stage Screen Conference, Milan 3-5 November 2023
Marina Romani and I gave our first conference paper about our research findings at the Sound Stage Screen Conference in Milan, 3-5 November 2023. It will be published as part of the conference proceedings in 2024, so watch this space.