Resonance: Writing, Culture & Sound

Writing, Culture & Sound
In this seminar, we'll explore sound and sonic phenomena across genres, disciplines, and soundscapes. We'll read texts that depict music, voices, and ambient sound with remarkable precision. We'll listen to performers, producers, and sound artists who work with live and recorded sound. We'll visit galleries and other acoustic spaces, while reading theory and criticism that will help us to attend to human and nonhuman sound and the idea of acoustic ecology.

One goal of the course is to sharpen our ears and further develop our "close listening" (Charles Bernstein) skills. But another is to find new ways to re-hear, rather than re-vise, our own work and practice. Accordingly, we may investigate the problems and possibilities of sound in such wide-ranging areas as theater, film & television, sound art, musicology, urban planning, and/or architecture. We will balance some of the more utopian claims about sound culture against readings in deaf studies and the art of deaf artists such as Ilya Kaminsky and Christine Sun Kim.

Along the way, we'll consider questions about sound and identity, and the sonic double consciousness of immigrants, refugees, and displaced people. We'll rehash old arguments about music versus poetry, about visual bias in literature and philosophy, and consider whether soundscapes of pre-phonograph eras are inscribed in their literature, and the extent to which audio technology influenced art movements of the twentieth century.

I invite students to bring their own projects to the course, and to respond to prompts with creative projects and/or critical writing.