Yulia Shpinitskaya

My research areas bridge together sound studies, soundscape, sound design, and sound anthropology, spanning versatile aspects of sound studies.

My book A Theory of Multicultural Texts: The Music of Erik Bergman As a Phenomenon of Multicultural Europe was released in September 2016. Bringing together semiotics, musicology, and cultural anthropology, it proposes a theory of musical cultural mixtures, semiotically defined as multicultural texts, develops conceptual framework and analytical tools to approach them, and closely examines works of Erik Bergman, the father of Finnish modernism, as multicultural texts. 

In parallel I have been conducting research on the relationship of image, sound and music objects in A. Tarkovsky’s films. In the recent years the focus expanded to the study of sound media, sound design, and creative process in twentieth-century Russia, via collaboration with the international research group Deceptive Arts. Machines, Magic, Media / Les Arts Trompeurs. Machines, Magie, Médias, hosted by LABEX Arts-H2H — The Laboratory of Excellence in Arts and Human Mediations, Paris/France, IRCAV Research Laboratory (Institute for Research on Cinema and Audiovisual Media, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3), and the Theremin Centre for Electroacoustic Music (Moscow).

One more large research area is devoted to exploration of cultural concepts and sacred forms of sound in non-European cultures based on ethnographic materials, cultural anthropology and findings of ethnomusicology, archaeomusicology and archaeoacoustics. The project develops via comparative study of myth, sound rituals, sacred singing and performance, and study of acoustics of sacred sites.