Sound Studies
Sound studies, which have been practiced primarily in the English-speaking world since the 1970s, challenge traditionally oriented musicology insofar as music becomes merely a special cultural case of intentionally designed sound. Similar to visual studies, this quasi-acoustic counterpart is not a clearly defined discipline with a distinct history or clearly definable research traditions. Its approaches, questions and methods are at least as numerous as the individuals who, each with a different disciplinary focus, turn their attention to all possible manifestations of sound, whether from a sociological, philosophical, anthropological, biological, medical, ecological, engineering or history of technology perspective.
With the establishment of a junior professorship for Sound Studies at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne in February 2017, a bridge is being built between the different cultures of knowledge, whereby musical and music-cultural phenomena are just as much a focus as the handling of sounding materials and sounding objects in neighboring art disciplines (radio plays, sound art, acoustic art, cinematic sound design, Foley, game audio, performance art, etc.). In addition to artistically or media-technologically guided music and sound production, sound studies address fundamental questions of auditory access to the world: According to which historical and cultural standards was or is listening done? What significance does the auditory have in relation to other sensory perceptions? How do people organize their acoustic living spaces? What agency do different actors and institutions have in this process? And what do certain tones, sounds and noises signify in specific contexts? An initial insight into relevant topics is provided by the blog Klangschaften, which is co-designed by our students.
There are points of contact with the other professorships at the Cologne Institute in the areas of film music and the emotional impact of sounds(Historical Musicology), the exploration of culturally specific sonic practices(Ethnomusicology), as well as questions of auditory attention and technologically mediated interaction(Systematic Musicology). Until Christoph von Blumröder's retirement, there was a particularly close collaboration with the Department of Contemporary Music. A major focus was placed on the cultivation and research of multiphonic electroacoustic music. With recourse to the structures that have grown continuously since 1998, Sound Studies in Cologne - including the supervision of the sound studio and the concert series Raum-Musik - continues this traditional undertaking.