Experimental Musics in Global Perspective
- Jim Sykes
- College of Arts & Sciences
- First-Year Seminar Grant
This course is a broad survey of experimental approaches to music and sound. Some musicians/inventions we consider include: Harry Partch’s instrument creations, which play scales based on just intonation and microtones; Conlon Nancarrow’s compositions for player piano; Maryanne Amacher’s experiments with otoacoustic emissions; Japanoise and noise rock; the new genres of “Black Midi” and glitch; developments in uses of field recordings; the global Maker Movement and DIY music technology; instrument inventions by the MIT media lab and used on Bjork’s “app” album; Chinese electronic music; metal in Indonesia; innovations in sound in some Hindu and Buddhist contexts in South and Southeast Asia; and appropriations of Balinese, Javanese, and West African musical ideas by Western composers like John Cage and Steve Reich. In the process, the course is a survey of the history of electronic musics and the invention of musical instruments in the twentieth century; a survey of the spread of Western styles of musical experimentation outside the West; and a consideration of how some distinct non-Western cultures praise or devalue innovation in their own ways. By exploring the intersections between physiology and culture, the course asks what it means to hear and make music “experimentally.”