CCA will explore aspects of Sound Studies over two consecutive years of sponsored seminars and related programming. In 2023-24 the theme will be “Voice: Sound, Technology, and Performance,” while in 2024-25 the focus shifts to “Resonance: Sound among the Disciplines.”
Sound Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field that has drawn from musicology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, media studies, anthropology, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, ethnic and indigenous studies, religion, animal studies, classics, and philosophy. It has been especially hospitable to Black scholars and performers with expertise in orature and other vocal traditions.
The 2024-25 Seminar, “Resonance: Sound Across the Disciplines,” chaired by Professors Carter Mathes and Xiaojue Wang, explores how resonance, as both an immaterial concept and an embodied experience, shapes our engagement with space and identity, and reverberates across the arts, literature, music, science, architecture, political life, and technology.
We will consider how resonance might be understood as an imagined immateriality, an aural effect in the sonic field that, try as it might, cannot escape its materialization in bodily, architectural, environmental, and cultural concerns. In this context, we might wonder, for instance, about the discrete registers of sound obtaining to voice(s) raised and heard within natural and built soundscapes. What are the implications of resonance for the way we interact with and understand our environment? How does it shape our sense of place and belonging as well as our communication with others? How does echo, timbre, or pitch conjure personal or cultural memory? How do our environments, our bodies, our objects of fixation resonate with sonority, noise, and semantic meaning? How does sound, as a concept, an object, an experience, resonate across the spectrum of disciplines of art, literature, music, science, and technology?
2024-25 Seminar - Resonance: Sound across the Disciplines
Directed by Xiaojue Wang and Carter Mathes
2024/2025 SEMINAR LEADERS
