Steven Feld — Acoustemologies

Listening to histories of listening, encountering sound as a way of knowing (that is, as an acoustemology), and recounting practices of recording and playback as dialogic auditing, Steven Feld will give a tour of such encounters in rainforest New Guinea, pastoral Europe, and urban Ghana in order to pose questions about the ways sonic ephemerality and materiality become one.

Steven Feld is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. Trained as a jazz musician, then filmmaker, then anthropologist, he has worked in textual, sound, and visual media since 1975 in Papua New Guinea, Europe, Japan, and Ghana.

Hillel Schwartz — Cross Polytopes & Octaphons More Agreeable: Toward A Taxonomy of Sounds All Around But Not Quite There

One-line teaser: Bombard the notion of "surround-sound" until it bursts, then listen to what happens.

Hillel Schwartz is a poet, translator, case manager, and independent scholar who has published widely on topics in cultural history. His most recent opus is Making Noise from Babylon to the Big Bang and Beyond, due out any moment from Zone/MIT Press.

This session of the Sensing the Unseen seminar is complete. Video, audio, and documentation from this session can be found on our blog. A podcast of this session can be found here, or download MP3 files of this session from the links below:

• 1.1 The Elusive: Listening — Steven Feld (presenter)
• 1.2 The Elusive: Listening — Wayne Marshall (discussant)
• 1.3 The Elusive: Listening — Hillel Schwartz (presenter)
• 1.4 The Elusive: Listening — Jimena Canales (discussant)