AS 095: TAP: Sound and Society
Fall 2015 ~ T/Th, 1:15-2:30pm ~ Lafayette L100

We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen.
But this does not mean our ears are always open.
–R. Murray Schafer, 2003.

This course is an interdisciplinary study of the role that sound, hearing, and listening play in human societies. Rather than assuming that hearing and listening are universal processes, in this course we will examine a number of examples that show how listening is historically and culturally specific. We will investigate the various ways in which human societies and communities experience sound, paying attention to how gender, race, religion, age, ability, and language shape how people hear and how they listen to and participate in the making of various sounds (for example: speech, music, noise, etc.). We will consider case studies of diverse practices of hearing, listening and sounding in contexts including Papua New Guinea, Jamaica, Egypt, and Brazil. We will then use our understanding of these non-European contexts to reconsider our own assumptions about sound in our society.

The following questions will animate our study of audition and sound:

• How do humans experience the realm of sound? What is the difference between hearing and listening? How do practices of audition vary over time and across distances? What is the relationship between hearing and other sensory perceptions?
• How are environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds understood and categorized cross-culturally? How has the distinction between sound and noise been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse contexts?
• How have practices of listening been transformed historically? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? How have sound technologies (architectural acoustics, sound recording, etc.) contributed to a transformation of the senses?