Revelators, Akousmatikoi - Sound in Art

Revelators, Akousmatikoi - Sound in Art, Music, and Ritual is an Art and Technology course focused on artists' use of sound in the creation of performance, recording, and immersive environments. Additionally, the course examines the history and theory of sound in art, ritual, and popular/experimental music through lectures, listening sessions, and screenings. This studio/lecture hybrid splits class time between lectures and the demonstration/employment of digital, AI, and analog methods for producing, installing, performing, and distributing sound across platforms. Participants will create single or multichannel sound works with an emphasis on experimental practice. In 1930, Blind Willie Johnson recorded the gospel blues classic "John the Revelator" for Columbia Records. Its haunting call-and-response vocals signal its origins in the "field songs" of enslaved people and the "spirituals" - syntheses of Ifa and Orisha religious rites, encoded messages of protest, and Christian religion - that informed modern gospel music. Its subject, John of Padmos, prophet of the Book of Revelation, vividly described the "loosing of the seven seals" that would unleash Apocalypse. Such "Revelators" have existed throughout human history-speaking, writing, illustration, and sometimes ranting their visions and prophecies-prefiguring the work of many contemporary visual, sound, and performance artists. Millenia earlier, at the birth of music as "organized sound", the Pythagorean cult splintered into Mathematikoi, forebears of positivist science, an Akousmatikoi (listeners), forebears of the arts - especially the sonict arts-who approached the Apeiron (infinite) by way of sound, art, and ritual.
Optional readings include excerpts from Amiri Baraka's Blues People, Iqbal and Pendergrass's Realism in Messaien Birdsong, Roberta Brown's Xenakis on Xenakis, Brandon LaBelle's Other: Maryann Amacher, Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun, Adrian Piper's Notes on Funk, Mike Kelley's Cross-Gender, Cross-Genre, Sean Albiez's Postsoul Futurama, African American cultural politics and early Detroit techno, and Fred Moten's Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis).