The Noise! Ethnomusicology

Conference Announcement: Listening In, Feeding Back
Start: 02/13/2009 - 14:00
End: 02/14/2009 - 22:00
Timezone: Etc/GMT-4
Location: 301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University; Concert location - Miller Theater, 2960 Broadway (at 116th Street)
Listening In, Feeding Back

Organizers:
David Novak, Columbia University, Society of Fellows in the Humanities
den12@columbia.edu
Ana Maria Ochoa, Columbia University, Department of Music
ao2110@columbia.edu

Conference and concert are free and open to the public. No registration or tickets necessary. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Description:
In recent years, several North American academic disciplines, including history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and media studies, have devoted significant attention towards practices of listening. The act of listening is undoubtedly an underexplored dimension of modern sensory experience -- and of modernity itself, which is too often characterized by an overdetermined regime of visuality. What can listening offer to emerging interdisciplinary work on perception, performance, aesthetics, social life, and the circulation of sound media? Listening is more than a given function of musical interpretation, which might attend to sound only in its deliberately aesthetic or openly communicative forms. Rather, it is a culturally-situated practice that shapes the particular spatial and material conditions of our perception. Listening influences the social distinctions of daily life, and is inextricably bound to aesthetic and bodily experiences with music and noise. And increasingly, characterizations of listening recognize its diverse practices as productive transcultural relationships, which in themselves constitute the globalization of media. Our experiences with sound are key to broad projects of self-making that rewrite logics of authorship and cultural origin through circulation and new modes of appropriation. read more »