Deep Listening: Ethnographic and Anthropological Approaches

In this class we will engage with a variety of research and representational methods and media used to document and understand the relationships between human, non-human animals, and the environment.  While traditionally ethnomusicology has been defined as the study of music in/as culture, we are coming to understand with the availability of new sound recording technologies, and post-colonial engagement with indigenous knowledge systems, that to fully grasp human sound production we need to expand how we see, hear, and know the world, and that we have much to learn from indigenous ways of understanding the world, from the non-human animal world, and from the natural environment.

We will host a number of important scholars/community intellectuals to open up this field as a way of knowing sound/music making in the contemporary world.  There is a group field project located in Philadelphia’s amazing black music history.

The class is open to graduate and upper level undergraduate students.