Image: Teodorik Menšl on Flickr, 2005

Later today, I am teaching a workshop on sound, kicking off our new GCDI Sound Series. In the workshop I will review a variety of digital tools, techniques and concepts for recording, editing and sharing sound.

Sound Workshop 10/11

Like the workshops led by previous Digital Fellows, my workshop is publicly available to follow online. It is currently available here through Google slides and it will soon also be available on my GitHub repository. The workshop proceeds along this general outline:

• Theorizing sound (‘sound’ vs. ‘audio,’ ‘acoustemology,’ ‘soundscape,’ ‘silence,’ ‘authenticity’)
• Recording sound (ethical considerations, equipment, key terms and techniques, sound archives)
• Editing and mixing audio (software, tips, techniques)
• Transcribing and/or coding audio (transcribing audio of human voices, qualitative coding, preparing audio for machine learning)
• Sharing or presenting with sound (interview project websites, digital storytelling, podcasting, sound installations)
• Resources at the GC (funding, office hours, workshops, events)

Overall, the workshop foregrounds an understanding of sound as a “modality of knowing and being in the world,” of creating a sense of place or a narrative – drawing from Steven Feld’s concept of “acoustemology” in “Sound Worlds” (2000).  While my own research as a cultural anthropologist is decidedly qualitative and my interest in sound is primarily in relation to interviews and oral histories, the workshop incorporates an array of resources that may be useful to folks doing research or projects with music, soundscapes and other forms of sound. And I do reference some awesome resources for those preparing sound for machine learning. Stay posted for a GC Digital Initiatives workshop this spring 2018 semester on that!

Simply put, I designed the workshop to share some things that I have learned and found useful so far for theorizing, recording, editing and sharing various kinds of sounds.  Much of this I learned through attending Professor John Barber’s DHSI course on Sounds and Digital Humanities at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada in June 2017 (which I blogged on before here) and a SoundCamp event in London in May 2017.

Hope you can make it!

I hope to see you later today, Wednesday, October 11th, at 6:30pm in GC room 9206! Register here. For those of you who can’t make it, stay posted for another sound workshop in the spring 2018 semester.

2017-2018 GCDI Sound Series #GCDIsound

This week’s sound workshop is just the first of a whole series of talks and workshops on sound that the GC Digital Fellows are organizing for this 2017-2018 academic year!

The GCDI Sound Series will be a series of talks and workshops on topics related to sound analysis, comparison, theory, production, and recording.  This series explores a variety of research methods and perspectives on sound, including audio annotation and processing, oral histories and interviews, soundscapes, and DIY audio equipment.  We invite scholars from all disciplines to explore ways we can study and use sound in our scholarship.

Our next scheduled GCDI Sound Series event will be a talk by Dr. Johanna Devaney, who will introduce and teach her open-source software, The Automatic Music Performance Analysis and Comparison Toolkit (AMPACT.org). The event will be held on Thursday, November 16th, from 6:30 – 8:30 PM in GC room 9206. The event is free and open to the public! Register here.

More information on the GCDI Sound Series and upcoming events will be posted here.