MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | CORPOREAL TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES

Hearing Changes

OCTOBER 29 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

100 years ago, Rainer Maria Rilke proposed bending a phonograph to the coronal suture of a skull to enact a reconnection of senses sundered by “instruments of research”. A decade or two later, Antonin Artaud conceived a reversal of soma and psyche in which the shaping of breath shapes affective state as acting. The keywords silence, noise, reduced listening, and soundscape mark related cognitive refashionings in music of the post-war period.

50 years ago, John Cage remarked that digital means induce “a change from the influences of scarcity or economy to the influences of abundance and—I’d be willing to say—waste… Our attitude is changing, our minds are changing, our experience is changing from the insistence upon making the best choice to the willingness to make many choices.” One marker of current anxiety with this industrious and choosy profusion is the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

The analog to digital conversion of figures of cognitive change in auditory culture, alternately audible, inaudible, conceptual and somatic, will be the focus of this talk.