Workshop Sounds of the Past, with introductory lecture by Sasha Rasmussen

Name: Workshop Sounds of the Past, with introductory lecture by Sasha Rasmussen
Start: 2025-11-17T14:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-11-17T16:00:00+01:00
Location: EhB - Erasmushogeschool Brussel

Schedule

Mon Nov 17 2025 at 02:00 pm to 04:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

EhB - Erasmushogeschool Brussel | Anderlecht, BU

Lecture Gender and the Conservatoire: mirror to the past, incentives for the future by Sasha Rasmussen (University of Nottingham)
&
Workshop – Sounds of the Past: Finding Aurality in Textual and Visual Source Material. Chair: Kurt Bertels (KCB, VUB)
Media Room, Campus Kaai. More information: https://www.kcb.be/en/pps2025
This interdisciplinary workshop is an exploration of historical soundscapes, both musical and ambient. How did people listen in the past, and how might we access their experience of sound through surviving archival materials? Especially in the absence of audio recordings, or for periods which predate this technology, what can we learn about listening practices through textual accounts or visual depictions? In analysing historical distinctions between ‘music’ and ‘noise’, or between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, we can retrace how sound contributed to cultural constructions of gender, race, and class, and how these soundscapes mapped onto the social geography of the modern city. Drawing on methodologies from historical musicology and sensory history, the workshop offers an introductory guide to integrating an awareness of aurality into research on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will discuss a number of case studies of historical actors who encountered sound in ways which either reinforced or subverted their sensory expectations, to illuminate the role of sound in shaping their lives and identities.