| Kommentar |
This seminar examines the interrelationship between sound, space and public culture. What makes any given space more habitable for some rather than others and how is sound implicated in these power dynamics? With a focus on the ways that sound reflects and simultaneously informs social hierarchy in public space, students will use music and sound to investigate a range of political issues such as segregation, gentrification, sonic governance, urban design, crowds, political movements, migration, and even war. These issues challenge notions of public spaces as neutral and open-to-all, helping us to re-conceive of cities and society in general as arenas of ongoing social and political struggle. By expanding the parameters of music as an analytic category, students will learn and critically apply core concepts in sound studies such as acoustemology, soundscapes, noise, voice, and silence as crucial dimensions of political participation, social performance, and public culture at large. Ethnography—that is, long-term participant observation and personal interviews—can prove particularly useful in threshing out these issues. If ethnographic literature in the humanities has historically prioritized a Western-centric bias toward the visual, how can a focus on sound change our understandings of the politics of public space? |
| Literatur |
Feld, Steven. 1996. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” Senses of Place. Eds Steven Feld and Keith Basso, 91-135. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Novak, David and Matt Sakakeeny. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham: Duke University Press.
Eisenberg, Andrew. 2013. “Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Swahili Coast.” In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Ed. Georgina Born. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hsieh, Jennifer. 2021. “Making Noise in Urban Taiwan: Decibals, Noise, the State and Sono-sociality.” American Ethnologist: 1-14.
Patch, Justin. 2020. Discordant Democracy: Noise, Affect, Populism and the Presidential Campaign. New York: Routledge.
Pieslak, Jonathan. 2007. “Sound Targets: Music and the War in Iraq.” Journal of Musicological Research 26(2-3): 123-149.
Cusick, Suzanne. 2006. “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon.” Transcultural Music Review 10.
Kunreuther, Laura. 2018. “Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity.” Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 1-33.
Hofman, Ana. “Disobedient: Activist Choirs, Radical Amateurism, and the Politics of the Past After Yugoslavia.” 2021. Ethnomusicology 64(1): 89-109.
Sprengel, Darci. 2021. “Reframing the Arab Winter: The Importance of Sleep and a Quiet Atmosphere after Defeated Revolutions.” Culture, Theory and Critique 2(3): 246-266.
Tausig, Ben. 2018. Bangkok is Ringing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press. |
