ENGL 3615

Gramophone, Radio, Podcast: Sound Recording as a Medium for Writing

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

This class examines current aural technologies of writing:  podcasts, audiobooks, site-specific headphone theater. We will focus on the challenges and opportunities of the present—making our own recordings along the way—from the point of view of the technologies' long history. Authors have always written for the ear, but after 1877, when Thomas Alva Edison read "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a gramophone horn, a new set of possibilities were born. What new kinds of writing were made possible by the gramophone disc, the microphone, long-range broadcasting, high fidelity, audiotape, multitrack recording, stereo, binaural, and quadraphonic mixing, headphones, the Walkman, digitality, streaming on-demand? What new audiences and forms of listening accompanied these new technologies? We will consider the meaning of each technology when it was avant-garde, from Edison to Gertrude Stein, from William S. Burroughs to the Last Poets, to the Radiolab, Serial, and Homecoming podcasts. This unique class will feature collaborations with Ithaca's Cherry Artspace and visiting artists-in-residence from The World According to Sound.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment preference given to: students in the Milstein program.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)

View Enrollment Information