Sound is often what transports us to alternative states; it is embedded in the ecstatic arts, figuring in experiences of musical rapture, radical dreaming, shamanic healing, social worlding. It can also be deeply harmful, instrumentalized in systems of control, where sound is weaponized and the source of trauma. Sound is an energy that passes across bodies and things, shivering material forms with vibrational currents and resonant sympathies, and it engenders feelings of connection, deepening and elaborating social synchronization through rhythms that call us into particular alignments and orientations. And in turn, sound also provides a medium for interrupting and disrupting, intervening within particular social orders with a given noise – how often individuals and communities carve out different forms of life by way of a sonic energy, whether in speaking up, voicing refusal, calling for change, or in sounding paths of escape and renewal, joy and celebration, to shift a dominant tonality toward a different form of social composition. From the dance floor to the house party, the quiet moment to the silent demonstration, sound underpins the movements of self-determination and collective imagination.

We’re interested to follow sound as a living energy, and how it provides a means for creating worlds. Sound will be emphasized as a “cosmopoetic technique”, operating as a channel, a medium, a guide in the crafting of a cosmic sense of life. As Ailton Krenak argues, our contemporary systems do much to undermine a planetary way of life, and a cosmology of connection, turning natural vitalities into material resource and breaking the poetic ecologies of interdependency with a logic of separation, enclosure, extraction. To return to a cosmic sense of life is to reforest the imagination; it is to listen to the rivers, the winds, the mountains as kin, returning us to a world of animacy; and it is to return to ourselves as deeply sensual, expressive beings, forming the basis for what Amitav Ghosh calls a “vitalist politics”, as a politics centered on living well.

Through readings and discussion, making sounds and listening differently, we’ll explore sound as a figure of vitality, a cosmopoetic medium, and a path toward imagining and manifesting a cosmic sense of life. Students will be encouraged to experiment with sound, crafting their own sonic worlds: from participatory practices and social engagement to fictional narrative and environmental recording, we’ll consider different methodologies as well as engage with a range of theoretical positions, to build a discourse and practice of cosmic sound. 

Schedule: 

April 14, April 21 / 14:00 - 17:00

April 28 / No class

May 5 / Online reading session, 16:00 - 17:30

May 12 / 14:00 - 18:30 (longer session)

May 19 / 14:30 - 17:00

May 26 / Special Session: 14:30 - 17:00, Meeting at Akademie der Künste,  Hanseatenweg. We'll be visiting the exhibition Berlin Carousel, holding our seminar as part of the exhibition. More details to follow.

June 2 / No class

June 9 / 14:30 - 18:30 (longer session) 

June 16, June 23, June 30 / 14:00 - 17:00

July 7 / 14:00 - 17:00

Bibliography:

The Third Ear, Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Life is not useful, Ailton Krenak

Afrofuturism, Ytasha L. Womack

Cosmic Music, ed. Joscelyn Godwin

Listening to Nature, Mark Peter Wright

Noise Map, Justin Bennett

Deep Listeners, Judith Becker

Night Call Radio, Kate Donovan

The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer

Aster of Ceremonies, JJJJJerome Ellis