Sound and Modernity

Catalog description

This seminar will investigate themes in the interdisciplinary field of inquiry known as sound studies. We will read texts from diverse disciplines with a focus on historical rather than ethnographic approaches to sound; therefore, we will treat such topics as listening, material culture (instruments, architectures), audio technologies, and sonic embodiment from the perspective of music history and its attendant methods. Rather than attempting a chronological history of sound, this syllabus groups the assigned readings around topic areas, allowing seminar participants to recognize sympathetic methodological concerns among disparate scholars, and to register important differences about how to research and write the history of sound.