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The Aurality Hub is a new series of faculty events — to meet and discuss, research and experiment with all that purports to the aural.
The Aurality Hub aims to reposition the media of academic inquiry and disciplinary hierarchies by way of the aural register — sound, music, noise, silence; orality, soundscape; listening, hearing; acoustics, vibrational practices; performance, radio, podcasting, dubbing; spatial sound, Ambisonics, Dolby, machine listening, more.
We take “aurality” as a still open site of conceptualization, one that refers in a basic way to the sphere where the aural always “takes place,” some where, some time – and thus where all auditory events are also enmeshed with cultural modes, medial economies, materials, technical and technological genealogies, scholarly discourses, industrial networks, etc. The basic conceit for each meeting is that we take turns in proposing and pre-circulating materials for discussion, and at the meeting (on a Friday, 1-3pm, twice a semester) each participant contributes their own experience and expertise. Rather than attending to each other’s specializations (as in conventional professional settings) we will attend to each other’s efforts to re-purpose our expertise. This is how “aurality” will reconstitute new hubs of interests and questions.
