Sound Matters: Audio, Visual, Material and Global Perspectives - Detailseite

In this seminar, we will examine how sound matters while discussing important concepts and various approaches to studying it. The seminar provides a framework for critically and creatively engaging with sound from multiple angles, in particular from audio, visual, material and global perspectives. The seminar places particular emphasis on the cultural, historical and socio-political significance of sound in relation to past developments, contemporary practices and future possibilities. In looking at a range of case studies, we will work with text, sound and film materials. We will also explore the subject empirically in jointly developed sonic explorations in archives, collections and exhibition spaces.

Topics will include: sensory perception and aesthetic practices, language-sound relationship, technologies and materialities, digitization and globalization, sound and colonial contexts, auditory knowledge production, sonic publics, auditory display and sonic epistemologies. The seminar's main language is English but inputs in German are welcome. Course assignments and MAPs can be submitted in English or German.

• Born, Georgina (2022) Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology. London: UCL
• Bull, Michael and Les Back (eds) (2020) The Auditory Culture Reader. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
• Cox, Rupert, Irving, Andrew and Christopher Wright (eds) (2016) Beyond Text? Critical Perspectives and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Grant, Jane, Matthias, John and David Prior (eds) (2021)The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Katz, Mark (2004) Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• LaBelle, Brandon (2018) Sonic Agency. Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths Press.
• Landry, Olivia (2022) A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Tkaczyk, Victoria (2023) Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.