Sound as Popular Culture

Sound is a subject through which popular culture can be analyzed in an innovative way. From an infant’s gurgles over a baby monitor to the roar of the crowd in a stadium to the sub-bass frequencies produced by sound systems in the disco era, sound - not necessarily aestheticized as music - is inextricably part of the many domains of popular culture.

Expanding this view taken by many scholars of cultural studies, the contributors to this conference and authors of the new MIT-Press-volume "Sound as Popular Culture" (2016) consider cultural practices concerning sound not merely as semiotic or signifying processes but as material, physical, perceptual, and sensory processes that integrate a multitude of cultural traditions and forms of knowledge. Echoes from the past, resonances of the present, and the contradictions and discontinuities that suggest the future.

This one day-symposion explores these aspects in an open PhD-colloquium with international researchers, in a public lecture, and in a public discussion on the field of Sound Studies with authors from MIT-Press and international colleagues.

This symposion is the final conference of the international research network "Sound in Media Culture" in cooperation with the research group "Sound & Senses" at the University of Copenhagen and the "Sound Studies Lab" at the University of Copenhagen.

Confirmed contributors (more TBC):

• Susanne Binas-Preisendörfer (Oldenburg, DE)
• Carolyn Birdsall (Amsterdam, NL)
• Jochen Bonz (Innsbruck, AT)
• Marta Garcia Quiñones (Barcelona, ES)
• Franco Fabbri (Turin, IT)
• Anahid Kassabian (Liverpool, UK)
• Jens Gerrit Papenburg (Berlin, DE)
• Toby Seay (Philadelphia, US)