Music Technologies and Culture

This course will investigate the constantly changing relationship between humans and sound, giving special attention to the history of technology within music. Without defining “culture” (but acknowledging that it has something to do with shared meaning-making that may involve — yet also transcend — geography, nationality, tradition, ethnicity, race, gender, and age), the course's starting place is the idea that different cultures generate different sounds and different ways of interpreting those sounds. Students will analyze a diverse range of media, participate in class discussions, and learn to take their own ideas seriously as historical data, as well as learn to engage experimentally with their awareness of their own experiences.   

In class, students will examine case studies that tend to focus on historical developments within the United States between the mid-nineteenth-century and the present day (e.g. the role of home recording technologies in the birth of hip-hop and punk in the midst of sociopolitical and legal tensions over what it means to own music). However, these case studies are meant to be illustrative, not authoritative; students are encouraged to draw from international and cross-cultural perspectives, both within class discussions and for their research projects.