Sound and the City

Spring 2016
Arch 239.2
Music 220.1 / CCN: 60765
3-4 units

Instructors: Nicholas Mathew (Music) and Nicholas de Monchaux (Architecture)

Friday 9AM-12PM
210 Hargrove Library

This seminar takes place at the intersection of sound studies and urban studies, architectural theory and musicology, making and thinking. It asks what each of these practices, emerging and long-established, has to learn from a range of premises: that sound and space are inseparably entangled, that sound crucially shapes how we know the world, and that the modern city has long hosted distinctive configurations of sound in space. A series of distinguished guests -- composers, DJs, philosophers of sound, sound designers, ethnomusicologists, and urbanists -- will help lead the seminar through some of the following questions: How might taking sound seriously as a producer of knowledge change our approach to urban design, or how scholars should theorize the social landscape of the city? What are the relationships between the "organized sounds" produced by musicians and the many urban soundscapes to which they belong? How have historical and political factors delineated and delimited urban soundscapes in the cities of the global North and South? How have architecture and sound design recently informed and transformed each other?

Confirmed visitors include Thomas Y. Levin, Brian Kane, Steven Feld, Alexander Rehding and Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky!