Chris Hoff & Sam Harnett, The World According to Sound
March 11, 7pm
Hope Room, Higgins Welcome Center

Ways of Knowing is a multi-channel audio event about humanities research and thought. For 70 minutes audience members will put on an eye mask, sit in the dark, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks them to rethink the world through their ears instead of their eyes. Participants will 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. All the pieces in the show are informed by contemporary humanities scholarship, and rendered into soundscapes for an octophonic speaker array. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-producers of Ways of Knowing, a podcast series made in partnership with academic institutions like Johns Hopkins, UChicago, and The University of Washington. They have published academic papers; spent a semester at Cornell as practitioners-in-residence; and performed their octophonic audio compositions at more than 50 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.