Thinking Through Musical Sound

How do musical sounds hang together and convey meaningful ideas to its local audience-emotions, stories, philosophies, even cosmologies? This course holds in tension musical sound's acoustic, semiotic, and ideological dimensions to theorize how it answers to diverse aesthetic and epistemic conditions across listening cultures. Students will engage a range of musical sounds through embodied analysis, (auto)ethnography, and close readings in music theory, ethnomusicology, and music perception. While this course welcomes students without previous training in music theory, it is also poised to challenge those with substantial experience.