The Ways of Knowing Tour

We’re visiting universities to celebrate academic inquiry with an immersive audio experience.

Get tickets here

The Show: For eighty minutes you are going to sit in total darkness, surrounded by loudspeakers, and go on a sonic voyage. You’ll hear the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, recordings made a century ago, and silence turned into music. You’ll be transported to 1930s Berlin, inside a waterfall, under a sand dune, and into the middle of a choir singing in the reverberant nave of a 6th-century cathedral. You’ll hear ideas, essays, books, theories, contemporary research, all translated into soundscapes that challenge you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes—and ultimately to reconnect with what makes academic inquiry so meaningful.

Who we are: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-creators of The World According to Sound, an audio project about the power of attentive listening. They co-produce Ways of Knowing, a podcast series made in partnership with academic institutions like Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and University of Washington. In past live shows, they have collaborated with musicians, artists and academics like Matmos, The Kronos Quartet, Chris Watson, Hildegard Westerkamp, Trevor Pinch, and Barry Truax. They’ve published academic papers; spent a semester at Cornell as Practitioners-in-Residence; and performed, guest lectured, and done workshops at more than 50 universities. They previously worked in public radio, where their reporting won two Edward R. Murrow Awards and was featured regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Science Friday, and other nationally-syndicated programs.

TOUR DATES 2026

San Francisco Bay Area

• Santa Clara University 1/28

• UC Berkeley 1/29

Midwest

• Carleton College 2/11

• University of Wisconsin-Madison 2/13

• University of Cincinnati 2/16

• Indiana University Bloomington 2/17

• University of Missouri 2/19

• Southern Illinois University Carbondale 2/21

• University of Alabama Huntsville 2/23

The Northeast

• Boston University 3/4

• Middlebury College 3/5

• The New School 3/9

• University of Rhode Island 3/11

• Amherst College 3/12

Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey

• Cornell University 3/23

• Lehigh University 3/24

• Bucknell University 3/25

• University of Pennsylvania 3/30

• New Jersey Institute of Technology 3/31

• SUNY Purchase 4/1

Mid-Atlantic South

• Virginia Tech 4/14

• Wake Forest University 4/15

• UNC Greensboro 4/16

West Coast - Fall 2026

• UCLA

• Claremont-McKenna College

• The ArtCenter

• University of Arizona

• UC Santa Cruz

• San José State University

• University of Washington

Upper Midwest - Fall 2026

• DePaul University

• Northwestern University (TBD)

• The University of Michigan

• The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• Miami University

Additional events, guest lectures, services: While on campus, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are available to guest lecture, facilitate public talks, do media training for faculty, and hold workshops for students about podcasting, audio production, and sonic storytelling.