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Synopsis – Sound Studies (Fall 2019)

Sound Studies is a burgeoning “field”, an interdisciplinary space, a conversation variously about mediation, circulation, body, voice, and listening; about aesthetics and technological innovation; about mobility, coloniality, and struggle; about property, rights, and creativity; about senses, subjects, history, performance and experience; about registers of representation. This seminar tracks one strand of the conversation – ethnographies about sound — for its contributions to the interdisciplinary study of sound and for its inflections of the broad debates.

The seminar argues against sound as exceptional. The ear and listening are not the anti-rational alternative to the eye and looking. Likewise, music and language do not stand as ephemeral acoustic arts in opposition to the material visual arts. Hearing is one among the senses, and always stands in relation to other senses. Any study of sound is at once a study of the sensorium; a study of the acoustic arts is at once a multimedia exploration. So one goal of the seminar’s focus is to consider the ways in which sound and music can be approached as a “case study” of the other senses and of other media. How are the methods of research, techniques of analysis and theoretical insights useful to and representative of expressive culture/public culture broadly?

For their own contributions to the seminar, students may work in sound or on sound, including music; or they may use the materials of the class to further their work addressing other aesthetic media or aspects of public culture.

The seminar will be embedded in the Ethnography Workshop, and will include opportunities for doing a sonic or multi-modal project.

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