Thesiss

Sound Recollections investigates film narratives, spatial acoustics, and software interfaces to ultimately argue that recording studio culture is continually framed through the production and consumption of wide-spread media objects. While there is a wealth of scholarship focusi…

Through its portfolio of practical case studies and its engagement with critical thinking from a range of disciplines, the PhD investigates the following key question: what are the technical, aesthetic and conceptual impacts of using binaural technology to create a soundscape? ‘…

Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity is a critique of the tenants of the Western sonic avant-garde through black music. I engage African diasporic music as a critical site where the modernist distinction between human and technology is endlessly challenged and shatter…

This dissertation questions the assumption that there is an inherent link between music and identity. In Part One, I provide an historical anthropology of the global dissemination of identity discourses on the arts and their development on the island nation of Sri Lanka, to demo…

In the Indian megacity of Mumbai, loudness is power. Over the last fifty years, politicians have emerged as the leading patrons of the exuberant music-oriented events comprising Hindu religious festivals. As sponsors of Hindu festival processions and other events, Mumbai’s polit…

This thesis explores three performances from the early career of lyric soprano Camilla Williams (1919-2012), who, in 1946, became the first Black singer to be given a regular contract with an American opera company (the New York City Opera). By analyzing archival materials from …

Focusing on several Italian and Portuguese novels that remarkably thematize the encounter of the human with the machine and its noise, this dissertation is an inquiry into the history and modalities of three archetypes of human-machine interactions: creature-creator (Carlo Collo…

From the cosmic background noise that proved the so-called Big Bang Theory in the 1960s, to more recent models using sound waves to explain solar activity, modern science agrees with ancient cosmology that the universe is far from silent. But, as most twenty-first-century space …

My dissertation project examines the relation between sound and space of twelfth-century polyphony in Notre-Dame cathedral during its construction. Beginning in the second half of the twelfth century, a dramatic shift in rhythmic organization in the polyphonic repertoire at Notr…

In the 1920s, the municipal government of New York City collaborated with scientists to conduct a series of noise surveys around the city, having endured decades of residents’ complaints of excess noise. At the same time, artists were creating work by drawing on the same raw mat…

“The Right to Tell: Listening Practices, Race and Recordings, 1959-1978,” is a multidisciplinary examination of LP recordings and their role in the formation of racial and national listening practices. In order to do so, I look at the protocols and structures of perception and d…

“Community” is a concept invoked by scholars, activists, organizers, and institutions with little reflection or understanding about how community forms. Communication scholarship, specifically rhetorical scholarship, ties community to citizenship and discourses about policy. Thi…

This study investigates the contemporary culture of sound baths through an oral history project consisting of interviews with practitioners from a small community in New York City. Contributing to current Sound Studies discourses on listening practices and sound culture, this di…

In this dissertation, I examine the works of Rubén Darío (1867-1916) and Sergio Ramírez (b. 1942) with the goal of determining their contributions to the construction and representation of sound, music, and sound technology in twentieth-century Nicaragua literature. I consider: …

This dissertation explores the significance of the folk for African American visual artists of the 20th century through paintings of Palmer C. Hayden. Alternatively labelled a superior colorist, a “janitor who paints”, a misguided humorist, a traditionalist whose work was neithe…

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area soundscape in northern Minnesota has a long and contested history but is most often characterized today as a pristine and distinctly silent wilderness. This thesis traces the construction and perpetuation of the Boundary Waters as a silent space by…

Gentrification is often considered in visual terms, where seeing an influx of coffee shops and bike lanes indicate that a neighborhood has gentrified, because it “looks” different from what was once there. Less explored, but no less important, are the musical and sonic dimension…