To Exist in Sound: Ambient & 4th World
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General
Course Long Title
To Exist in Sound: Ambient & 4th World
Subject Code
MAIC
Course Number
343
School(s)
Academic Level
UG - Undergraduate
Description
It's been half a century since Brian Eno embarked on ambient music as a conceptual project, conceiving the idea for Discreet Music while lying incapacitated (recovering from a car accident), listening to a barely audible recording of harp music merge with the background noises of the environment.
More than a genre, ambient music represents a situated and embodied mode of listening.
It is a music that responds to a yearning for guidance out of the confusions of late capitalism by situating the listener in the specific moment of now. And yet, it also adapts to our attentional tendencies to drift in and out of participation: occupying the foreground of our sensory field, then mingling or competing with simultaneous activities, then receding to the background like sonic wallpaper.
Can we be immersed or are we always distracted?
This class will investigate both how ambient music is experienced phenomenologically and conceived conceptually, incorporating Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening, Freud's essays on Transience and The Uncanny, Guy Debord's Theory of the Derive, Anahid Kassabian's Ubiquitous Listening, Marc Auge's Non-Places, John Hassel's Atmospherics, and David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.
Ambient music is also defined by its exploration of spatiality: its fabrication and evocation of sonic environments that one can inhabit, wander through and linger in.
As such, this class will alternate lectures and listening sessions with practical workshops and creative research projects that explore how ambient music is constructed from a materialist perspective.
We will experiment with sounding techniques for acoustic instruments and spaces; alchemizing tones and patterns using analog synthesizers and sequencers: 'tinting the air' by altering timbre and texture; exploring stasis and transience with tape loops; fabricating spatiality with reverb, panning and delay; and conjuring imaginary landscapes that integrate field recordings with synthesized sonic mimesis.
Ambient music is more popular and ubiquitous than ever. Does it risk being numbed-down and diluted to the point of banality by its current appropriation into playlists for "dental office waiting room," "lunch break pilates," or "daycare center cooling-off zone"? Has its potential as a creative practice been completely exhausted? Or, in the words of John Hassell, are there still horizons we can expand into, artificial boundaries to traverse, possible musics to be made?
More than a genre, ambient music represents a situated and embodied mode of listening.
It is a music that responds to a yearning for guidance out of the confusions of late capitalism by situating the listener in the specific moment of now. And yet, it also adapts to our attentional tendencies to drift in and out of participation: occupying the foreground of our sensory field, then mingling or competing with simultaneous activities, then receding to the background like sonic wallpaper.
Can we be immersed or are we always distracted?
This class will investigate both how ambient music is experienced phenomenologically and conceived conceptually, incorporating Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening, Freud's essays on Transience and The Uncanny, Guy Debord's Theory of the Derive, Anahid Kassabian's Ubiquitous Listening, Marc Auge's Non-Places, John Hassel's Atmospherics, and David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.
Ambient music is also defined by its exploration of spatiality: its fabrication and evocation of sonic environments that one can inhabit, wander through and linger in.
As such, this class will alternate lectures and listening sessions with practical workshops and creative research projects that explore how ambient music is constructed from a materialist perspective.
We will experiment with sounding techniques for acoustic instruments and spaces; alchemizing tones and patterns using analog synthesizers and sequencers: 'tinting the air' by altering timbre and texture; exploring stasis and transience with tape loops; fabricating spatiality with reverb, panning and delay; and conjuring imaginary landscapes that integrate field recordings with synthesized sonic mimesis.
Ambient music is more popular and ubiquitous than ever. Does it risk being numbed-down and diluted to the point of banality by its current appropriation into playlists for "dental office waiting room," "lunch break pilates," or "daycare center cooling-off zone"? Has its potential as a creative practice been completely exhausted? Or, in the words of John Hassell, are there still horizons we can expand into, artificial boundaries to traverse, possible musics to be made?
No Requisite Courses