Global Sounds

Catalog description

This course examines how recorded sounds have transformed musical practice, listening habits, cultural memory, and political life across the world. The course centers recorded media that made waves through global circulation. We begin by interrogating the divisions built into genre categories and asking: what makes "world music" global? Then we'll examine a series of case studies from a range of media - records, cassettes, radio, film soundtracks, CDs, and streaming services - to examine their impact. Through listening, reading and writing about global sounds, we will explore how recorded music travels across empires, diasporas, markets, and platforms, and how musicians and listeners use media to build local, national, and transnational publics. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement at 4 units only.