Music, Sound, and the Body

3 units

This course examines theories of the body, embodiment, and the senses as they relate to music and sound practices. Readings draw on scholarship from ethnomusicology, anthropology and geography of the senses, sound studies, dance studies, performance studies, and music cognition. If ethnomusicology is the study of people making music, this course explores how people make and experience music and sound with their bodies, through the full range of their senses. We will consider questions surrounding the ways in which musicians, audiences, listeners, and dancers perceive and experience music in their bodies and contribute to the making of sound. By centering the body, we will necessarily consider lived experience along intersecting axes of difference such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Course readings and discussions will therefore focus on the social and political affordances and limitations of body-based practices and their theorization. Case studies will include a broad range of sound-movement practices, from electronic dance music and black social dance to Sufi and Buddhist religious practices, queer taiko drumming, and deaf music-making. Over the course of the semester, students will develop their own project exploring course themes, and they will be asked to participate in music-movement workshops throughout the course. This is an upper-level/graduate-level course, so some knowledge of music and/or dance concepts is assumed, but neither previous music/dance experience nor normative bodily ability are required.