SDG Detail

ANTH 3880Listening: Ethnography of Sound

Undergraduate course

Project description

This course explores the possibilities of an ethnography of sound by attending to a range of listening encounters: in urban soundscapes of the city and in natural soundscapes of acoustic ecology; from histories of audible pasts and echoes of auditory cultural spaces; through repeated listenings in the age of electronic reproduction, and through chance encounters at the limits of listening with experimental music. Sound, noise, voice, reverberation, and silence, from the technological resonances produced by Edison, Bell, and others, to the theoretical reflections of John Cage and beyond: the course turns away from the screen and dominant epistemologies of the visual, for an extended moment, in active pursuit of sonorous objects and cultural sonorities.