Program at a Glance

Please note: there will be two parallel sessions on both days of the conference. 


Friday AM (April 29)
8:00AM–9:00AM registration, Humanities Institute Lobby
9:00–12:15 (coffee break 10:30-10:45), Humanities Institute 1006 & 1008

The Natural and the Technical 
Chair: Stephen Decatur Smith (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

  • Andrew Greenwood (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), “Scotland’s ‘Sonic Enlightenment’”
  • Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada) “Curating Past Soundscapes and Sonic Memories through Radio: Field Recording, Exploratory Soundwork, and the Historical Evidence of Hearing Cultures”
  • Henry Peter Reese (University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia), “The Noise of the Desert: Recording Aboriginal Australia in the 1920s”
  • Jennifer Hsieh (Stanford University),”Elusive Noise: Techniques of Arbitration and the Hearing Subject in Environmental Noise Control”

Animating Inscriptions
Chair: Catherine Bradley (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

  • Mary Caldwell (University of Pennsylvania), “Singing Joy, Singing Pain: Vocalizing Emotion in the Medieval Conductus”
  • Andrew Albin (Fordham University at Lincoln Center), “The Manuscript is an Instrument and We Must Play”
  • Mark Rodgers (Yale University), “Archive Traces: Petrucci’s Frottole and the Process of Replication”
  • Kassandra Hartford (Muehlenberg College), “A Listening Guide to No Man’s Land: Capturing the Aural Culture of the First World War in Text and Music”

Friday PM
1:15PM–4:30PM (coffee break 4:30-5:00pm), Humanities Institute 1006 & 1008

Immersion
Chair: Robert Crease (Stony Brook University, Department of Philosophy)

  • Angharad Davis (Yale University), “‘A Physical Possibility’: Sound, Vibration, and the Fourth Dimension in George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique
  • Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), “Acousmatic Voices in the Brazilian Backlands”
  • Scott Wilson (Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand) “Dawn Chorus: Institutional Sound Use, Identity and Ideology”
  • John Melillo (University of Arizona), “Breaking Waves and Aurality”

Intersensoriality
Chair: Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Brooklyn College of CUNY)

  • Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada), “‘With ravished fingers’: Unseeing and Unhearing the Musical Encounters of Helen Keller”
  • Bryce Peake (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), “Taking ‘Listening Seriously’ Seriously: Standpoint Acoustemology and Ethnographic Methods in Gibraltar’s British Botanical Garden”
  • Katherine Kaiser (Independent Scholar), “Listening with Vocal Chords: An Embodied Approach to Recorded Voices in Twentieth Century Music”
  • Magdalena Zdrodowska (Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland), “Sound-Amplifying Instruments for the Deaf: between Assistive and Emancipatory Technologies”

 


Friday Plenary Session
5:00PM–7:00PM, Humanities Institute 1006
—reception to follow—
Chair: Erika Honisch (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

Plenary Speakers:

Emma Dillon (King’s College London)
: “Sound History and the Comedy of Absence”
Stefan Helmreich (MIT)
: “For and Against Sound: Cosmic Waveforms, Cochlear Implant Music, and Hearing Humans”


Saturday AM (April 30)
9:00AM-noon (coffee break, 10:30-10:45), Student Activities Center 302 & 303

Soundstates
Chair: Judith Lochhead (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

  • Sara Ballance (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Noisy Bodies: Gender, Physicality, and the Nineteenth-Century Silent Piano”
  • Alexandra Kieffer (Rice University), “Debussy’s ‘Consonant’ Sevenths and the Challenge of Reception History”
  • Clara Latham (Dartmouth College), “Echoes of Helmholtz: Sonic Materiality and Psychoanalytic Technique”
  • Nicholas Tochka (University of Maryland), “Sound, Sovereignty, and “the Battle for the Mind” in the Early Cold War, c. 1945-1960”

Histories of Hardware
Chair: Ryan Minor (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

  • Felix Gerloff (Academy of Art and Design Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Northwestern Switzerland, Basel, Switzerland) and Sebastian Schwesinger (Humboldt-University Berlin, Berlin, Germany), “The Genealogy and Efficacy of the Decibel”
  • Andrea Bohlman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Peter McMurray (Harvard University), “Rewind: or, Rethinking the Phonographic Regime”
  • Ted Gordon (University of Chicago), “The Buchla Box and the Cultural Technique of Electronic Music”
  • Lilian Radovac (New York University), “Outside the Box: Segregating Sound in 1970s New York”

Saturday PM
1:30PM–4:30PM (coffee break, 2:45–3), Student Activities Center 302 & 303

Empires and Regimes
Chair: Margarethe Adams (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

  • G. Douglas Barrett (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany) “The Limits of Sound: Critical Music After Sound
  • David Suisman (University of Delaware) “The Militarization of Sound: Power, the State, and the Acoustics of Modern Warfare”
  • Eleni Kallimopolou (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece), “Religious Buildings in Transition: The Meanings of Sacred Sound in Early 20th-Century Thessaloniki”
  • Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Pennsylvania), “Parisian Soundstates of Emergency”

Special Session
Discussants: Don Ihde (Stony Brook University, Department of Philosophy) and Jennifer Stoever (Binghamton University)

  • Andrés García Molina (Columbia University), “Telecommunications in Cuba and Theories of Sound, Media, and Infrastructure”
  • Megan Hill (University of Michigan) “‘Asakusa Meibutsu’: A Geisha in a Tokyo Soundscape Montage”
  • Jacques Vest (University of Michigan), “On the Bottling of Souls: The Metaphysics of Sound Reproduction, 1878-1929”
  • Stephanie Probst (Harvard University)  “Sound to Point and Line: Visualizing Music at the Bauhaus”
  • Alexander Newton (University of Texas-Austin), “Music on the Body, Music in the Ears: Gendered Hollywood Film”

Saturday Plenary Session
5:00–7:00PM, Wang Center Lecture Hall 2
Chair: Benjamin Tausig (Stony Brook University, Music Department)

Plenary Speakers:
Alexander Rehding (Harvard University)
: “Three Music Theory Lessons 1999 – 1518 – 1834”
Emily Thompson (Princeton University)
: “Sound Practice: Hybrid Technologies in the American Film Industry, 1926-1933”