Mack Hagood (Media, Journalism, and Film) was recently featured on Freakonomics Radio, a popular podcast with more than 12 million downloads per  month.

In the episode “Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears,” Hagood explains the differences between “sound” and “noise,” how sound has challenged our “sense of autonomy,” and new sound-related medical diagnoses. 

“History doesn’t just change the sounds around us. It also reshapes how we define what’s noise,” Hagood notes. “History also reshapes the senses themselves—what sounds pleasing and displeasing to us, how we listen, how we learn to listen, how we engage with sound. We’ve been trained by technologies like the telephone and headphones to listen closely and evaluate sounds in a particular way that’s different from in the past. And so we have this new pressure to survive through our ability to concentrate. And that’s when noise starts to seem like a real big problem.”  

Hagood’s public scholarship on sound was supported by a Humanities Center Research Collaborative Grant. The award funded the production of a new podcast, Phantom Power, featuring Hagood and cris cheek (English). Phantom Power has a large following of listeners interested in the sonic arts and humanities.

Hagood appreciates the help he has received from the Humanities Center: “As always, I am grateful for the tremendous support that Miami, CAS, MJF, and the Humanities Center provide for my research, and I’m excited to see some of that work reaching the broader public” Hagood says. 

You can find the episode on Freakonomics Radio’s website here.