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(Un)Disciplining Sound Studies

(Un)Disciplining Sound Studies

Sound studies has established itself rapidly as a new discipline—or perhaps better, an interdisciplinary field—with canonic texts, handbooks, and readers acting as guides to the identity of the field, new graduate programs, and a burgeoning crop of annual conferences. In this one-day colloquium we will reflect on the emergence of sound studies; we invite not only enthusiasts and those persuaded of the significance of the new field but also sceptics and even cynics to join us in considering: How and why has this new disciplinary formation come into being? Does it merit the status of an (inter)discipline? What is gained and what lost, what is made audible and what inaudible, with the coining of the new field? Has sound acted primarily as a means of working around, or shedding, some of the lacunae associated with the inherited formations of music studies? Is the category ‘sound’ a robust basis for probing and critical conceptual, historical and/or ethnographic research? And had we wanted to design from scratch a transversal space encompassing new directions in, broadly, music/sound and media/technology studies, on what other grounds might we have wanted to build?

Program:

Introductory remarks: 9:30-9:40am

Panel 1: 9:45-11:00am:

Nina Eidsheim, Professor, Musicology, UCLA, “‘I was pretty sure that you weren’t a white guy’: The Timbre-Race Disequilibrium in The Voice”

Amy Bauer, Associate Professor, Music, UCI, “Ecological Listening and the Sublime Object in the Music of Helena Tulve”

Moderator: Michael Dessen

Panel 2: 11:10am-12:30pm:

Jann Pasler, Professor, Music, UCSD,  “Some precedents: Sound, vibrations, and the occult c. 1900”

James Steintrager, Professor, English, Comparative Literature, and European Languages and Studies, UCI, “Morphology Now! Pierre Schaeffer, Genealogy, and Disciplinary Contingency”

Moderator: Stephan Hammel

Lunch break: 12:30-1:30pm

Panel 3: 1:30-2:45pm

Georgina Born, Professor, Music & Anthropology, Oxford, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, UCI,  “The Strangeness of Disciplinary Relations: Music and Sound Studies”

Sarah Hankins, Assistant Professor, Music, UCSD, “Sounding the City and the Nation: Acoustemologies of Refugee Crisis in Tel Aviv"

Moderator: James Steintrager

Panel 4: 2:45-4:15pm

Amy Cimini, Assistant Professor, Music, UCSD, “sondra perry’s IT'S IN THE GAME // in san diego // in four fragments”

Peter Krapp, Professor, Film and Media Studies, UCI,  “Between Melomania and Audiophilia”

Moderator: Georgina Born

Concluding remarks and discussion: 4:15-4:30pm

Reception: 4:30-6pm