Led by Steven Connor.

Summer Term 2004

This course brings attention to bear on a neglected area of modern cultural studies, the experience of sound and hearing. It will explore the emergence of the auditory culture of the late-twentieth-century and will ask questions such as the following:

• How can auditory forms and experiences bulk so large in contemporary culture– in radio, live and recorded music, oral cultures and the technologies of voice transmissions– and yet be the subject of such scant attention?
• What kind of provocation do auditory forms and experiences represent for traditional aesthetics and academic modes of analysis and judgment?
• What part does the massive technological and industrial investment in sound play in the general reconfiguration of the senses in modern life?
• What if an epoch of the ear were succeeding on the long dominance of the eye?
• What capacities and disciplinary resources would be needed to investigate contemporary experiences of sound and hearing?

Assessment: Students may submit either an essay on a topic relating to the material encountered on the course, or a piece which uses sound to explore and illustrate this material. Students submitting a sound piece must accompany it with a short written explication of its form and purpose.

Week 1

Introduction – From Eye to Ear
What is the nature of sound and hearing? What is the standing of sound in academic and philosophical discourse? And what are the relations between the eye and the ear? (Are they changing?)
Background reading:
Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for a Religious and Cultural HIstory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981)
Steven Connor, "The Modern Auditory I" in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 203-23.
John Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (London: Arrow Books, 1991)

Week 2

The Auditory I – Psychoanalysis and Hearing
What part do hearing and the voice play in the formation of the self? We will look at the little that psychoanalysis has had to say about this subject, and wonder why it is so little.
Background reading:
Otto Isakower, "On the Exceptional Position of the Auditory Sphere", International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 20 (1939): 340-8
William G. Niederland, "Early Auditory Experiences, Beating Fantasies and Primal Scene", Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13 (1958): 471-504
Guy Rosolato, "La voix: entre corps et langage", Revue francaise de psychanalyse, 38 (1974):75-94
Didier Anzou, "The Sound Image of the Self", in The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989)
Edith Lecourt, "The Musical Envelope", in Psychic Envelopes, ed. Didier Anzieu, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990), pp. 211-36.

Week 3

Noise and Music
Why have modern composers and music makers been so fascinated by noise? What are the pleasures of loudness, decomposition and interference in sound?
Background reading:
Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises" (1911), in The Art of Noises, trans. Braclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986)
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Obedience", in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 165-81.
Steven Connor, Noise: series of radio talks first broadcast, BBC Radio 3, January 1997: tape in Self-Access Centre, 43 Gordon Square, click here for a transcript

Week 4

Film, Sound and Silence
Is film a visual medium? Is the sountrack condemned to be merely an enhancement of or accompaniment to the image? What are the relations between voice and music in film? What are the meanings of silence in a world of ceaseless sound-production?
Background reading:
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Marcel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)

Week 5

Technologies of Sound – Telephone to Internet
How have technologies of transmission and reproduction formed and trasformed the experience of voice and sound? What changes are digital technologies making in the production, reproduction and experience of music? How might these altered technologies be altering bodily and sexual experience?
Background reading:
The Social Impact of the Telephone, ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1977)
Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1992)
Nicolson Baker, Vox (London: Granta, 1992)

Week 6

Sound (in) Art
We will conclude by considering some examples of radiophonic and aural art in the light of the ideas, interests and sensitivities opened up during the course.
Background reading:
TDR: The Drama Review, 40:3 (1996): special issue on Experimental Sound and Radio, ed. Allen S. Weiss, accompanying tape, Voice Tears, in Self-Access Centre, 43 Gordon Square