Ways of Knowing

-A Sonic Celebration of the Humanities

We want to visit your campus with our immersive audio event about the power and beauty of academic research and thought.

The Show: For 70 minutes you are going to put on an eye mask, sit in the dark, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects. All the pieces in the show are informed by contemporary humanities scholarship, and rendered into soundscapes for an octophonic speaker array. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

Who we are: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-producers of Ways of Knowing, a podcast series made in partnership with academic institutions like Johns Hopkins, UChicago, and The University of Washington. They have published academic papers; spent a semester at Cornell as Practitioners-in-Residence; and performed at more than 25 colleges and 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, The World, Science Friday, and other nationally-syndicated radio programs.

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.