| Beschreibung |
Every electronic sound arrives through a machine, and every machine carries assumptions about what listening is for. This seminar takes those assumptions as its subject. We work across a century of electronic and electroacoustic music, tape composition, computer synthesis, sound art and current practice, but not as a chronology. Instead we proceed by mediation: each session sets a contemporary work against an older one and asks what technical, institutional or perceptual conditions connect them. The method runs in both directions. A piece made this year is read back into the studio conditions, listening habits and material constraints from which its techniques descend. A work from the 1950s or 1960s is heard forward, as something that continues to operate in equipment, software and habits still in use. Neither direction is a matter of influence. What we are after is the recurrence of problems: the grain of the recorded material, the instrument as an argument about music, the room and the loudspeaker as compositional media, the relation between what is calculated and what is heard. Archives are central to this. Almost everything we can hear of this history reaches us through a recording, a catalogue, a reissue, a scan, an upload, and each of these is a decision about what survives and in what form. We treat archives not as neutral storage but as instruments in their own right: institutional collections, broadcast holdings, commercial reissue programmes, private tape libraries, and the unofficial archives that circulate online. Reading a work means also reading the conditions under which it has been kept, transferred, described and made audible again. Sessions run three hours and are built around three activities held in tension: listening, reading, and discussion. We listen at length and more than once. Texts are short, read carefully, and treated as evidence rather than commentary. Discussion is the point at which the two meet. The seminar supports and feeds into several Project and Fach Modules, in particular Audio Tools I and II, Community of Dissent, and the Sendehalle archive project, and it is intended to give students working in these contexts a historical and critical vocabulary for what they are already doing. It also connects to Sonic Tuesdays, the weekly listening and discussion forum organised collaboratively by the three sound professorships of the Bauhaus-Universität and their students, where several of the works and questions raised here are taken up in a wider setting. No prior technical training is required. Students who work with sound are encouraged to bring their own material into the seminar; those who do not will still find the questions addressed to them, since the object throughout is not a repertoire but the historically shaped condition of being able to hear at all. |
