For 80 minutes you are going to put on an eye mask, sit in the dark, and go on an auditory journey that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and Ancient Greek, to the first piece of musique concrete, a choir singing in the Hagia Sophia, 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 began his career as an audio engineer for public radio, and Sam Harnett was a labor and technology reporter. They have worked in public media for 20 years, contributed to national programs, won various awards, and in 2020 produced NPR’s most listened to story of the year. They came to realize everything they were making was starting to sound exactly the same… and felt like it had the same intent: to capture and capitalize on your attention. They wrote about this phenomenon in an academic paper titled “The Pabulum of Public Radio and Podcasting: Why It Is Bad and How Academia Can Help,” did a residency at Cornell University, created a podcast that broke conventions, and made another about humanities research. They then turned those programs into a series of live shows on topics ranging from birds to bodies, from time to transposition.
