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TALK: Sounding the Limits of Life: For and Against Sound

January 19, 2017 @ 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Screen shot 2016-02-01 at 8.32.40 AMWhat is sound? At a moment when modes of sonic representation and transmission bring into earshot sound from previously unheard realms—the deep sea, the inside of the head, outer space; when new technologies make it possible to conjoin hearing and deaf worlds through a common currency of vibration; and when techniques of “sonification” render audible nonsonic material and information (sun spots, climatechange data, nineteenthcentury visual tracings of vibration patterns)— the definition of “sound” has expanded to access worlds previously inaudible, even unimagined. Thinking through recent technologies of transduction, eduction, and sonfication, this talk asks how we should conceptualize sound — as object? as event? as waves in oceans of media?

Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) and, most recently, of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond(Princeton University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, and The Wire .

Sponsors: The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, Transcriptions Center, and the Center for Information, Technology and Society.

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Details

Date:
January 19, 2017
Time:
5:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Website:
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/sounding-the-limits-of-life-for-and-against-sound/

Venue