About
Bridging medieval and modern, the Material Imagination Workshop explores sound as an embodied experience.
Invited speakers as well as Stanford faculty and graduate students will present their research and center the discussion on short pre-circulated papers.
Sound assumes an immaterial quality that allows it to permeate bounded space. It appears just as soon as it disappears, weaving through barriers in both unpredictable and controllable ways. Through archeoacoustics sound of past civilizations can be reconstructed and provide an auditory aspect of these lost worlds as for instance Byzantine chant.
How can we productively bring studies on prosody in poetry to shed light on the "wet acoustics" of sacred space? How could a study of urbanism encapsulate sound as an integral feature of the city? How can humanists engage the physics of acoustics or neuroscience in order to explore the role of sound in activating memory and the imagination? How does history, culture, and geography influence different ways of hearing from one community to the next?
Format
Discussion will center on short pre-circulated papers posted on this website before the individual sessions. These written statements will explore the connection between sound and the spaces and materials that modify it and inflect it with culturally specific meaning and experience. Topics have included medieval chant and mystic experience in Hildegard von Bingen, architecture of Renaissance Italy, war reportage from Iraq, nineteenth-century sound recordings, and the soundscapes of the Islamic city, Cairo, and South Asia.
