Sonic Ethnography

ANTH 2722, Spring 2014

Tues Fri 10:30-12:00

+ weekly listening session TBD

Vanserg 110 & 111

Instructor: Ernst Karel

Office hours: Thurs 10-12, Vanserg 111

Teaching Fellow: Benny Shaffer

Lab hours: TBD, Vanserg 108/114

C ourse description

This is a graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce
anthropologically informed audio works which record and interpret culture and lived experience. Hearing is of
course fundamentally important to anthropological practice, as is sight, and yet ethnographies tend to rely on a
very attenuated acoustic manifestation of culture: transcribed dialogue. Projects in this class will look beyond
conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately
evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into
autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic
representation through the sensory dimension of sound.

The course is an opportunity to broaden the possibilities for 'audio documentary' or 'ethnographic audio'.
Projects will be contextualized with readings and discussions in the anthropology of sound, but the class takes
seriously Steven Feld's call instead to do anthropology in sound, and emphasis is placed on phonography and
working hands-on with audio. It is through making that students will investigate the question of how a sound
work might function as an ethnographic text, revealing potentially invisible dimensions of human experience.
To this end the course also looks to related sonic practices and fields, including electroacoustic composition
and acoustic ecology. But hearing does not exist in isolation from our other sensory modalities, and audio work
exists in a wider context of possibilities or strategies for documenting, representing, or evoking human
experience. The theoretical or interpretive tools which have been developed and deployed for cognate
genres, from experimental ethnographic writing to documentary or ethnographic vilm, will also be brought to
bear on discussions of sonic ethnography.

Students will work intensively on audio projects, receiving training on recording techniques, audio editing and
post-production techniques. Presentation strategies for final projects will be discussed and decided on
individual bases. Projects will be situated in relationship to cognate fields, including the anthropology of the
senses, interdisciplinary sound studies, ethnomusicology, ethnographic cinema, sound art, sound mapping,
soundscape composition, and experimental nonfiction media practices which involve location recording.

The course emphasizes intensive listening: listening to sounds in an ethnographic setting, listening through
microphones while in the act of recording, listening to those recordings in an environment divorced from that in
which they were initially registered, and ultimately, listening to and evaluating edited compositions made from
those recordings. Furthermore, through weekly listening sessions and home listening, students will also gain a
familiarity with existing genres and uses of nonfiction audio in anthropology and related fields, and of
possibilities for creative use of the medium going forward.

Technology Expectations

This course is media and technology intensive. Experience recording sound or image, or working with digital
media software of any kind, will be valuable, but basic instruction will be provided for using audio recording
equipment and audio editing software, including Pro Tools. At the same time, students will be expected to
learn by doing, and to share skills with each other. In this way, students will build a solid foundation for
understanding how digital audio works, allowing for its more effective future use in conjunction with other
media, whether video, photography, text, or on-line multimedia applications.

Audio recording equipment will be provided by the Sensory Ethnography Lab, although students are also
welcome to use their own. It is expected that all students have some familiarity and experience working with
Macintosh computers. Pro Tools workstations in Vanserg Building will be available for working on course
projects. Again, students who have access to or prefer their own digital audio workstation software are
welcome to work elsewhere.

Teaching Fellow Benny Shaffer will be conducting technology workshops and will hold lab hours in Vanserg for
assisting with navigating the hardware and software required for this work.

C ourse Projects

This is a practice-based class. For all projects to be made over the course of the semester, students will select a
local 'site', however broadly construed, for ethnographic research, which they will revisit on a weekly basis over
the course of the semester, and where the basic activity of research is sound recording. For students who are
preparing to do fieldwork abroad, the local site should be related in some specifiable way to that site.

Moving back and forth between the chosen field site and the studio throughout the semester, students will
produce six audio projects over the course of the semester, including the final project. In this way discoveries
made through editing can lead to changes in recording strategies, and vice versa. Projects will be open-ended;
structures or approaches may grow out of or be motivated by issues originating in each student's experience of
their site. Although the medium of each project is sound, the subject matter certainly need not be. To structure
each individual assignment, students will choose from a set of broad parameters that indicate certain
dimensions of the project, parameters that will be generated through in-class discussion. For example,
parameters for recording may include static/tripod vs. mobile/handheld, indoor vs. outdoor, participatory, and
observational strategies. Parameters for choosing subjects may include human activities, mechanical activities,
speech, an environment, a relationship, an interaction, or other event. Formal parameters may include
abstraction, narrative construction, fictiveness, forms of collaboration and dispersal of authorship with one’s
subjects -- an acoustic analogue to Jean Rouch’s anthropologie partagée -- or relationships to other media.

We will listen to as many of the projects in class as possible, and as a group, constructively critique works in
progress. If there is not time to listen to all projects in class, students will share their audio projects with each
other using the course's iSite or other web interface, and comment/converse on the works on that interface.

Project assignments have specific due-dates (every other Tuesday). But you needn't wait to finish one before
starting another; you might have several idea-threads going at once both in terms of recording and in the edit
room. Projects may be considered cumulative, in that you will start recording at your site at the beginning of
the semester, and continue visiting that site each week and making recordings throughout the semester.

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Recordings from any point may be used in any editing assignment. Further details about recording and editing
strategies for each of the assignments will be made available in other documents and in class discussions, but
here is the short version:

#1 Listen on site. Select field site; spend time (two hours) listening there, even before beginning to record.
Write a short response (one page) to questions/considerations to be handed out.

#2 Instants: using a stereo audio file editor (e.g. ocenaudio or Audacity), cut from what you've recorded so
far a few very short “shots” (10-30 seconds each) which convey something happening. Submit 3-5 of these.

#3 Events: again using a stereo file editor, cut or select a single-take recording of 3-6 minutes or so which
represents a discrete event. Submit two of these.

Edited pieces: each 3-8 minutes.

#4 Edited piece 1: A sense of place.

#5 Edited piece 2: A sense of a person; includes voice.

#6 Edited piece 3: In both recording and editing, approach your site/topic in a completely different way
from previous assignments. Optional: Consider a different presentation strategy/format.

#7 Final piece. Uses materials recorded over the course of the semester. Format of each project to be
determined on individual bases.

Listening Sessions

The weekly listening sessions constitute a major component of the course. On a studio-quality sound system,
we will listen to a variety of sound work across genre categories – phonography, sound art, documentary,
electroacoustic composition, and various combinations thereof. In addition to listening, we will examine the
presentation strategies of each work, for example printed texts, images, or other contextual elements which
contribute to the work. A large collection of relevant work will also be made available to students for additional
outside listening. Students will turn in short written responses to each listening session -- less than a page will
do -- with thoughts, questions, reactions.

Readings

In keeping with the emphasis of this course on practice, readings are generally short, and often suggestive
more than substantive. Many of the readings have excellent bibliographies which can guide further reading. As
listed on the syllabus, readings are to be done in preparation for the Friday class meetings for which they are
listed.

Readings and listenings are flexible and subject to change throughout the semester, depending on interests
and emergent pathways.

Grading

The requirements for the class are: (1) Attendance at class meetings and at weekly listening sessions. Class

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time is short and being on time is required. Absences count against the grade; more than three absences will
result in a failing grade; and being late twice will count as one absence. (2) Weekly visits to the field site,
attention to location recording, and improvement in recording technique over time. (3) Demonstrated ability to
use the editing software to achieve the intellectual/aesthetic aims of individual projects, and meeting due dates
for each project. (4) Participation in critiques of work in progress, written responses to listening sessions, and
in-class discussions about readings.

C ourse texts (available at the Harvard C o- op textbook section)

Required:
Voegelin, Salome. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York:
Continuum.
Sterne, Jonathan (ed). 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.

Additional assigned texts are compiled in a course reader, available at Gnomon Copy.

Recommended:
Kelly, Caleb (ed). 2011. Sound. Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, MIT Press.

Software (on Sensory Ethnography Lab edit stations)

Ocenaudio, Audacity - stereo audio editing/playback

Pro Tools - multitrack audio editing
Izotope RX and Ozone – audio manipulation and repair

C ourse outline

WEEK 1
Tuesday 28 January
Overview and introduction. Interviews.

Friday 31 January
Discuss potential field sites.

Reading:
Feld, Steven, and Donald Brenneis. 2004. Doing anthropology in sound, American Ethnologist 31: 461-
474.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2012 [2007]. An anthropologist underwater: Immersive soundscapes, submarine
cyborgs, and transductive anthropology. In The Sound Studies Reader [orig. American Ethnologist,
Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 621–641].
Samuels, D; L. Meintjes, A Ochoa, T Porcello. 2010. Soundscapes: Toward a sounded anthropology.
Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329-345.
Spray, Stephanie. 2011. Aesthetic Experience and Applied Acoustemology: Blue Sky, White River
liner notes. Anthropology News.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. Sonic Imaginings, in Sound Studies Reader;
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. Introduction: Hello! and ch. 5: Social Genesis of Sound Fidelity. In The audible
past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

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 WEEK 2 Anthropology of/in sound
Tuesday 4 February
Project #1 due: listening on site, writing
Listening: various
Discuss field sites and brainstorm parameters for class projects.

Technology workshop: Microphones and audio recorders. Demonstrate basic stereo editing with stereo file
editor (ocenaudio).

Recommended reading before technology workshop:

Meyers, Helen. 1992. Field technology. In Ethnomusicology: An introduction. New York: Norton.

Listening:
Peter Cusack, Favourite Beijing Sounds (2007)
Steven Feld, Voices of the Rainforest (Rykodisc, 1991); The Time of Bells, Vol. 1 (Voxlox, 2004)
Michael Pisaro/Toshiya Tsunoda, Crosshatches (Erstwhile, 2012)

Friday 7 February
Reading:
Feld, Steven. 1996. Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua
New Guinea, in S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research
Press.
Peirce, Charles Saunders. 1932. Ch. 2, Division of signs (excerpts), in Charles Hartshorne and Pau Weiss
(eds.), Collected papers, vol II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Optional:
Feld, Steven. 2010. Re- producing acoustic landscapes. In Pasquale Gagliardi, Bruno Latour, and Pedro
Memelsdorff (eds.), Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration, Firenze:
Olschki, 2010, pp. 97-114.

WEEK 3 On listening
Tuesday 11 February
Project #2 due: instants
Listen and critique
Listening:
Pierre Schaeffer
Francisco López, 'Trilogy of the Americas': La Selva (V2_Archief, 1998); Buildings [New York] (V2_Archief, 2001);
and Wind [Patagonia] (and/OAR, 2007)
Pieces mentioned in Voegelin, ch. 1 (Bernard Parmegiani, Cathy Lane, Stini Arn,
Gregory Whitehead, Susan Stone, Iannis Xenakis)
Friday 14 February
Reading:
Voegelin, Salome. 2010. Introduction and Chapter 1, Listening. Listening to noise and silence. New York:
Continuum.
Chion, Michel. 2012 [1994]. The three modes of listening. In The Sound Studies Reader (orig. Audio-
vision: Sound on screen. Columbia University Press).
Francisco López. 2004. Profound listening and environmental sound matter. In Audio culture:
Readings in modern music. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. New York: Continuum.

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Ihde, Don 2012 [1977]. The auditory dimension. The Sound Studies Reader [orig. Listening and voice: A
phenomenology of sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. Note: entire 1984 second edition available online
via Hollis.]

Optional:
Demers, Joanna. 2009. Field recording, sound art and objecthood. Organised Sound, vol. 14, issue 01,
pp. 39-45.
Koutsomichalis, Marinos. 2013. On soundscapes, phonography, and environmental sound art.
Journal of Sonic Studies, volume 4, nr. 1. http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a05

WEEK 4 Space and place

Tuesday 18 February
In-class technology workshop:
Multitrack audio in the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), with Pro Tools.
Automation of volume, panning, and plugin parameters.
Listening:
Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox, Air pressure (Gruenrekorder, 2012)
Annea Lockwood, A sound map of the Danube (2008) and
A sound map of the Hoosatonic River (3leaves, 2013)
Peter Cusack, Sounds from dangerous places (ReR Megacorp, 2012)

Friday 21 February
Required:
Casey, Edward. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time:
Phenomenological prolegomena. In S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press.
Norman, Katharine. 2012. Listening together, making place. Organised Sound 17(3): 257-265.

Optional:
Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Chapters 1, Introduction, and 2, Auditory spatial awareness.
Spaces speak, are you listening? Experiencing aural architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

WEEK 5 Place
Monday 24 February
Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity: Hearing Through the Body
Mara Mills and Mark Butler
4:15-6:00 p.m., Holden Chapel

Tuesday 25 February
Project #3 due: events
Listen and critique
Listening:
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Landscape in Metamorphoses (Gruenrekorder, 2008).
John Arndt, Field recordings from the Great Salt Lake Desert (Gallery 400, 2006)
Pieces mentioned in Voegelin, ch. 3 (John Cage, Christof Migone, Antonin Artaud,
Robert Curgenven, Morton Feldman)
Jonty Semper, Kenotaphion (Charrm, 2001)

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Friday 28 February
Voegelin, Salome. 2010. Chapter 3, Silence. Listening to noise and silence. New York: Continuum.
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. 2012. Sonic Menageries: C omposing the sound of place. Organised
Sound 17(3): 223–229.

WEEK 6 “Soundscape” and soundscape composition

Tuesday 4 March
Listen and critique
Listening:
World Soundscape Project, The Vancouver Soundscape (1973, 1996)
Hildegard Westerkamp, Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), Cricket Voice (1987) Yannick Dauby, Tai-pak thian san
piàn (Kalerne Editions, 2011) Gilles Aubry, Les écoutis de caïre (Gruenrekorder, 2010)
Toshiya Tsunoda, O Kokos Tis Anixis/Grains of Spring (edition.t, 2013)

Wednesday 5 March
Ernst Karel quadraphonic performance in conjunction with Hourly Directional exhibition
6:00 p.m., ACT Cube, MIT

Friday 7 March
Required:
Schafer, R. Murray. “The Soundscape” in The Sound Studies Reader.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Against soundscape. In Carlyle, A. (ed.) Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in
Artistic Practice, Paris : Double Entendre.
Kelman, Ari Y. 2010. Rethinking the soundscape: A critical genealogy of a key term in sound
studies, The Senses and Society, 5(2): 212-234.
Drever, John Levack. 2002. Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and
acousmatic music. Organised Sound 7(1): 21–27
Truax, Barry. 2012. Sound, listening and place: The aesthetic dilemma. Organised Sound 17(3): 193-
201
And other very short essays from the 2002 special issue of Organised Sound on soundscape composition:
Barry Truax. Genres and techniques of soundscape composition as developed at Simon
Fraser University. pp. 5-14
Andrea McCartney. Alien intimacies: Hearing science fiction narratives in Hildegard
Westerkamp's Cricket Voices. pp. 45-49
David Kolber. Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk: Shifting perspectives in real
world music. pp. 41-43
Hildegard Westerkamp. Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology. pp. 51-56

Optional:
Schafer, R. Murray. 2012 [1977]. Excerpts, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books.

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 WEEK 7 Voice
Tuesday 11 March
Project #4 due: sense of place
Listen and critique

Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity: Sounds and the Brain

Vijay Iyer and Aniruddh Patel
4:15-6:00 p.m., Holden Chapel
Listening:
Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy: The idea of north (1967), The latecomers (1969), The quiet in the land (1977)
Andrea Polli, Sonic Antarctica (Gruenrekorder, 2008)
Cathy Lane, The Hebrides Suite (Gruenrekorder, 2013)
Alessandro Bosetti, Zwölfzungen (DeutschlandRadio Kultur, 2006)

Friday 14 March
Required:
Harkness, Nicholas. 2011. Anthropology at the phonosonic nexus. Anthropology News 52(1).
Ihde, Don. 1984 [1977]. A phenomenology of voice. In Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound.
Second edition. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 185-202. [Note: entire book available
online via Hollis.]
Barthes, Roland. 2012 [1977]. The grain of the voice. In The Sound Studies Reader.

Optional:
Dolar, Mladen. 2012 [2006]. The linguistics of the voice. In The Sound Studies Reader.
Basso, Keith. 1970. ‘To give up on words’: Silence in Western Apache culture. Southwestern Journal
of Anthropology 26(3): 213-230.

WEEK 8 Interlude
Spring recess – no class
Investigate online sound maps (e.g., aporee.org) and sound archives (e.g., London Sound Survey).
Think about different exhibition strategies for the final project.

WEEK 9 Extra-sonic location recording, sound mapping

Tuesday 25 March
Technology workshop:
Equalization (EQ) and dynamics processors in the DAW
Basic audio premastering
(come in with problems/questions)
Listening: Erik DeLuca, [in] (Everglade Records, 2011)
Christina Kubisch, La ville magnétique: 24 Promenades électromagnétiques à Poitiers (Ville de Poitiers, 2008),
Five electrical walks (Important Records, 2007)
Toshiya Tsunoda, Scenery of Decalcomania (2004), The Temple Recordings (edition.t, 2013)
Jana Winderen, Energy field (Touch, 2010)

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Friday 28 March
Reading:
Voegelin, Salome. 2010. Chapter 4, Time and space. Listening to noise and silence. New York:
Continuum. Pp. 123-128, 144-145, 149-151, and 156-160.

WEEK 10 Locative media, subjective interventions

Monday 31 March
Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity: Aural Memory
Wolfgang Ernst and Karin Bijsterveld
4:15-6:00 p.m., Holden Chapel

Tuesday 1 April
Project #5 due: sense of a person, with voice
Listen and critique
Listening:
Ouïe/Dire, Atlanta (2003)
Betsey Biggs, Eleven dreams for Red Hook (2008) Michael Pisaro, Transparent City (Editions Wandelweiser
Records, 2007)

Friday 4 April
Visiting Artist: Teri Rueb

Internet research:
Cilia Erens, Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller, Betsey Biggs, Teri Rueb

Optional:
Butler, Toby. 2006. A walk of art: The potential of the sound walk as practice in cultural
geography. Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 6, 889-908.

WEEK 11
Presentation strategies for audio
Tuesday 8 April
Listen and critique.
Decide formats and presentation strategies for final projects,
e.g., radio (WHRB), online platforms, concert/performance, physical media, installation, integrating audio with
other media, or other.
Listening:
TBD

Friday 11 April
Reading:
Mitchell, WJT. 2005. There are no visual media. Journal of Visual Culture. 4(2): 257-266
Henley, Paul. 2007. Seeing, hearing, feeling: Sound and the despotism of the eye in “visual”
anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review. 23(1): 54-63
Altman, Rick. 2012 [1992]. Four and a half film fallacies. In The Sound Studies Reader.

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 WEEK 12
Monday 14 April
Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity: Reflections on the Voice
Brian Massumi and Steven Connor
4:15-6:00 p.m., Holden Chapel

Tuesday 15 April
Project #6 due: parameters III
Listen and critique
Listening:
Works in progress
Friday 18 April
Listen and critique

WEEK 13
Monday 21 April
Sawyer Seminar, Hearing Modernity: Ending session
Jacques Attali
4:15-6:00 p.m., Holden Chapel

Tuesday 22 April
Works in progress
Listening:
Works in progress, TBD

Friday 25 April
Works in progress

WEEK 14
Tuesday 29 April
Final projects due

Saturday evening, May 3 or May 10? (TBD)

Broadcast of final projects on WHRB-FM, 88.1

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