Tag Archives: music

Second Line: Footwork in New Orleans (Lowlines by Petra Barran)

A new podcast called Lowlines takes us to a New Orleans Second Line, the brass band tradition that comes out of Black funeral processions and social clubs and is known not only for the power of the music but for amazing dancing known as footwork. Continue reading →

John Cage: Echoes of the Anechoic

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage’s experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? Continue reading →

Sonic AI: Steph Ceraso & Hussein Boon

Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype. Continue reading →

Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes

Musician and sound artist Brian Harnetty breathes new, musical life into the analog meditations of 60s Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. Continue reading →

Forest Listening Rooms (Brian Harnetty)

What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our guest this episode knows the answer. BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist … Continue reading →

Ears Racing (Jennifer Stoever)

This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism … Continue reading →