| Description |
This course listens closely to sounds, historicizes the technologies from which they resonate, and tours their cultural surroundings. We analyze acoustics of ritual, everyday life, social identities, and nature, for example, and relate the auditory to the visual and textual. How do voices, radio, cinema, concerts, phonographs, MP3s, world music, and recording studios mediate culture? How is sound a "thing" that can be contemplated, packaged, or sold? What is at stake in debates about digital vs. analogue, liveness, fidelity, and intellectual property? Projects will explore possibilities for portraying ethnographic knowledge with sound media. |