The World According to Sound at UC Berkeley

Surrounded by an octophonic ring of powerful loudspeakers, you are going to sit in the dark for 70 minutes, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes.

You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects.

Through these sound pieces, the show examines how our attention is often directed toward very specific modes of understanding, while other ways of knowing are left out. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

LOCATION

Berkeley Center for New Media 426 Sutardja Dai Hall

CREATORS

Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-producers of Ways of Knowing, a podcast series made in partnership with academic institutions like Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and The University of Washington. They have published academic papers; spent a semester at Cornell University as practitioners-in-residence; and performed their octophonic audio compositions at more than 75 universities, theaters, and art spaces. They previously worked in public radio, where their reporting won two Edward R. Murrow Awards for excellence in sound design and was featured regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, The World, Science Friday, and other nationally-syndicated radio programs.

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