The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound designers, A Slightly Curving Place is an exhibition that responds to Umashankar's practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Umashankar asserts that we cannot just look for theatres in landscapes of the past; we must listen for them. In this dossier, contributors to the exhibition extend the notion of listening to an archaeological site to include practices of listening to text, textures, technologies, the body and the fields of recording.

中文翻译：

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声音考古学：一个略微弯曲的地方介绍

Umashankar Manthravadi 的生活和工作是一部贯穿 20 世纪下半叶的声音和技术史。作为一名自学成才的声学考古学家，他在 1990 年代中期开始测量前现代表演空间的声学特性，并从 2000 年代初开始制造 Ambisonic 麦克风，以便在更远的地方开展他的项目。汇集了作家、编舞、舞者、音乐家、现场录音师和音响设计师，一个稍微弯曲的地方是一个回应 Umashankar 实践的展览，并提出了聆听过去的可能性以及它仍然存在的缺席。Umashankar 断言，我们不能只在过去的风景中寻找剧院；我们必须倾听他们的声音。在这份档案中，展览的贡献者将聆听考古遗址的概念扩展到包括聆听文本、纹理、技术、身体和录音领域的实践。