Media and Methods: Sound
MIT's Comparative Media Studies course examines how humans perceive and organize sound across cultures and historical periods. Topics include the cross-cultural construal of environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds, the rise of telephony and architectural acoustics, the history of sound recording, and the global spread of these technologies. Students take up questions of ownership, authorship, and copyright raised by digital file sharing, and study how the boundary between sound and noise gets drawn differently across scientific and cultural contexts. Auditory examples illustrate the lectures, and the course builds in structured practice in written and oral communication, reflecting its small MIT seminar format capped at 20 students. Materials are available through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license, including syllabus and assignment materials, free to access with no certificate offered.