Audio Culture: Theories and Practices in Music Now

Audio Culture: Theories and Practices in Music Now is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies course taught by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.

Course Description
This course will explore a range of vanguard musical practices and various approaches to thinking theoretically and critically about them. We will traverse musical areas such as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrete, free improvisation, turntablism, and electronica and examine these via philosophy, critical theory, film/video and statements by composers and producers. Investigating different modes of listening to and talking about contemporary music, we will ask such questions as: What is the nature of music in relationship to silence and noise? What are the effects of recording and sampling on contemporary musical life? Can music have a political or critical function? Are the distinctions between "classical" and "popular," "high art" and "mass art" still appropriate in the contemporary setting?