Survey of Sound Art

Sound Art draws on many fields, among them:
experimental music, experimental theater,
installation, sculpture, architecture, and poetry,
but what all sound art works have as their primary
focus is the experience of sound and listening.
Following an introduction to psychoacoustics and
phenomenology, we will examine how sound art
implicates the listening body through frequency,
intensity and duration, and how sound can shape
our sense of space and place.

This class will be a survey of works by a wide
variety of artists throughout the 20th Century and
into the present. It will also include
cross-cultural examples of artistic practices that
invoke deep listening-from archeo-acoustic
excavations of oracle rooms in Malta to trance
states induced by frequency-modulation in Bali and
field-recordings from Chernobyl.

Primarily a lecture class, there will also be
weekly listening sessions and journal writing
requirements.

Students have the option to co-register for
MTHY-306 / MTHY-506 The Experimenting Ear and
MSCM-310 / MTHY-510 - ACOUSTICS: Applied Physics
for Musicians and complete a cluster project for
this course.