Music and Sound Archives

(2 Credits)

This two-credit, half-semester course introduces students to music and sound archives and the questions of memory, historical evidence, and preservation they raise. Relying on archives at NYU and beyond, this course focuses on contrasting collections documenting specific social groups and historical situations through sound. We will interrogate the many ways we continually retrieve, lose, and transform the past through informal daily habits and more systematic methods of preserving memory. We will also address technical and ethical dilemmas that surround archival sound collection and preservation in the digital age. Students will dig collectively in the archives in and outside of class meetings. They will discuss the significance of archival findings in weekly short essays and verbal presentations, which engage arguments from relevant secondary literature.