Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Course Description
Examines the ways people experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. It considers how sound/noise/music boundaries have been imagined, created, and modeled across sociocultural and historical contexts. Students will learn how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, remix, and copyright in the digital age are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples—sound art, environmental recordings, music—will be provided and invited throughout the term.
Requirements
Students will read assigned texts in advance of each of the class sessions for which texts are listed and contribute short comments (3–4 sentences) just prior to these meetings. These comments will serve as jumping off points
for class discussion.
Sound Object
Students will create a sound object — a musical or sound art composition, a soundscape, a podcast, a mash-up, a supercut—by semester’s end. In-class sessions will provide guidance on digital audio workstations, mixing, studio use. An aspirational goal of the class will be to create an album we can post on Bandcamp.
Papers
Students will write a short (1500 words) paper due during Session 6, on any aspect of the readings up through that date that have inspired them and that may inflect the making of their class sound object. A final paper (also 1500 words or so) should accompany the sound object, pointing to readings that have been useful, to the object’s intent, and more. Details to be discussed in class.
