The Material Imagination: Sound, Space, and Human Consciousness

This workshop explores how attention to the materiality of sound opens up new questions about history, art, architecture, religion, and society. In contrast to established research on music and language that emphasizes textual meaning of sounds, this workshop engages with the materiality and physical presence of acoustic phenomena in order to consider the sensuous space through which human experience takes place. From the medieval to the modern, the corporeal to the technological, and the historical past to the imagined future, this workshop fosters innovative scholarship across disciplines that include art history, architecture, music, anthropology, English, history, classics, and religious studies.