Media and Methods: Sound
Fall 2012
This course explores the ways in which humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. It examines how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally. It describes the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, sound recording, and the globalized travel of these technologies. Students address questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing. There is a particular focus on how the sound/noise boundary is imagined, created and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples will be provided. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication provided. At MIT, this course is limited to 20 students.
Readings
- [SSR] = Sterne, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader . Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 9780415771313.
- [Shaw] = Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion . Edited by Leonard Connolly. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2008. ISBN: 9780713679977.
- Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction . Duke University Press, 2003. pp. 310–51, and 99–117.
- SES #: 8 · READINGS: Picker, John. “Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity.” In The Victorian World . Edited by Martin Hewitt. Routledge, 2012, pp. 603–18. ISBN: 9780415491877.
- Kafka, Franz. “My Neighbor.” The Complete Stories . Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Schocken Books, 1995. pp. 424-25. ISBN: 9780805210552.
- 23 · [Sterne] “Format Theory”, and chapter 3: “Perceptual Coding and the Domestication of Noise.” pp. 1–31, and 92–127.
- [Sterne] Chapter 3 continued, and chapter 5: “Of MPEG, Measurement, and Men.” pp. 148–83.
- [Sterne] Chapter 6: “Is Music a Thing?” and “The End of MP3.” pp. 184–246.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗Historical OpenCourseWare
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.