Experimental Audio Production

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

In this class, you will develop fluency in sound design, music production and audio storytelling through the foundational skills of listening, recording, editing and mixing. You will also work toward developing your own aesthetic philosophy as an experimental audio producer by learning about the practice of musicians, sound artists and scholars whose work stages experiments that challenge dominant social structures. These artist/scholars – including George Lewis, Milford Graves, Pauline Oliveros, Molly Joyce, Hildegard Westerkamp, Annea Lockwood, Ernst Karel and others - work at the nexus of musical practices such as Improvisation and Experimental Composition and fields of inquiry such as Feminism, Disability Studies, African American Studies and Anthropology. Drawing from work by poets and fiction writers that produce podcasts, and/or audio fiction, you will also learn about recent theoretical and practical applications for disrupting the conventional audio storytelling narrative structure. Through this combination of technical training and aesthetic inquiry, you will gain a framework for creating your own experimental audio production workflow. You will walk away from the course with a series of episodic or site-specific content such as: a podcast series, a site-specific sound installation event or proposal, a series of scored film clips, a series of songs, or a series of spatial audio pieces.