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"This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples - sound art, environmental recordings, music - will be provided and invited throughout the term."

"Setting out to explore the sonic environment of a city is a daunting task. Seeking to discover how and where meaning is attributed, in relationship to the acoustic environment, is a different beast all together. The aim is not to provide a definitive answer to these questions but to set out in a dialogue that employs landscape and acoustic ecologies with an anthropological perspective of culture, place and sound."

"How do human beings experience sonic environments under historically and culturally changing circumstances - and what are the epistemological implications of such a turn to an experiential hearing perspective in the wider field of sensory studies? "

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"This essay explores how the sound of skateboarding can be studied as a critical analysis and transcultural anthropology of sound. Combining the analysis of the particular sensual aspects of skateboarding with an investigation of the cultural and urban discourses and politics of this performative practice, the article proposes theoretical and methodological perspectives of studying the particular relationship of sound, knowledge and space."

"Listening as an anthropological issue"

Lying minutes off the coast of the Bronx mainland is City Island. Spanning only 1.5 miles in length and occupying space off the coasts of both New York City and Nassau County, its singular location and history make the island a living laboratory for exploring New York City's history and future. The entire length of City Island can be easily traversed by foot and the surrounding water can be seen and heard from virtually all points. This proximity to the water lends City Island residents a unique perspective, as they enjoy many of the conveniences of an urban life, yet still maintain a close relationship with the water. This walk will incorporate anthropological 'field study' techniques. The participants will be engaged in exercises designed to observe the environment and decipher its visual and aural 'cues'. The group will uncover the relatively unknown wonders of this "island existence" that thrive within the confines of an urban environment.

It was the anthropologist's desire to understand the many ways that sound can be meaningful, coupled with the artist's ability to 'think outside the box', - leading to talk of thunderstorms harmonizing with jazz concerts and 'contrapuntal conversations' - which gave us the theme of the conference - 'The Body, the Environment, and Human Sound-making'. This conference, with its many complementary papers and presentations, you see and hear here now. Steven Feld suggested that a new form of media might help give the papers the voice they needed. We took this advice, and hope that the possibility to hear the sounds and see the visuals of many of the papers as you read them gives an important new dimension to the conference proceedings.

""We found that ambient noise is an important antecedent for creative cognition," said Ravi Mehta, a professor of business administration at the University of Illinois. "A moderate level of noise not only enhances creative problem-solving but also leads to a greater adoption of innovative products in certain settings.""

Liminaria aims at narrating the territory of Fortore, a marginal rural region located in the South of Italy, through an artistic point of view, putting together the ability of digital storytelling and the approach of different disciplines (literature, sociology, aesthetics, anthropology) and different fields of investigations (design, oenogastronomy).

" Ernst Karel is Lecturer on Anthropology, Assistant Director of the Film Study Center, and Lab Manager for the renowned Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. In his audio projects, he works with analog electronics and location recordings, sometimes separately, sometimes in combination, to create pieces that move between the abstract and the documentary. Karel collaborates with filmmakers as a sound recordist, mixer, and sound designer. Notably, Karel has worked on key films produced at the Sensory Ethnography Lab including Sweetgrass (2009) and Leviathan (2012), both of which were released in UK cinemas via Dogwoof."

"As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014's The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of 'object' leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's musical term objet sonore - the 'sound object', which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of 'sound object', shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author's own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane's critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O'Callaghan's thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny's anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel's thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept."

Sounds are ever present: They envelop and permeate us, consolidating, dissolving and complicating relationships. Through a genuine agency of their own, sounds can articulate protest or approval, serve as a political statement or thought, and establish ties between people, entities and environments.

"In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing"

"The performative sensory environment Displace 2.0 takes place in the building of the recently dissolved platform TAG in the Hague for the 2012 TodaysArt festival. Displace 2.0 puts your sensory experience in the foreground. Groups of visitors progress through the three floors of the TAG building, encountering a series of environments and experience sensory-based actions that intermingle the senses of smell, taste, sight, sound and touch. At first, these sensory modalities are separated from each other, but then they grow over time to cause intense, almost hallucinatory sensations merging to the point of saturation."

The artist-investigator tunes his work to the undocumented, the surveilled, immigrants and prisoners; those fleeing the talons of the state

"Stonehenge is a ruin. Whatever sound it originally had 3,000 years ago has been lost but now, using technology created for video games and architects, Dr Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield has - with the help of some ancient instruments - created a virtual sound tour of Stonehenge as it would have sounded with all the stones in place."