Global Studios and Audiotopias

UG - Undergraduate

Students in this class will form remote
collaborative music ensembles with guest artists
that will include musicians from across the globe.
Past collaborations have involved Bergsonist
(Morocco/NYC), Ela Orleans (Poland/France), MC
Yallah (Uganda), Debmaster (Germany), Francis
Ayamga/Top Link Studios (Ghana), Adhan Zidan
(Egypt), Lucas Santtana (Brazil), The Meridian
Brothers (Colombia), and Takako Minekawa (Japan)
Dustin Wong (LA). This course will explore how
hybridity as a model for collaboration and
composition manifests itself in record production
and is afforded and transformed by remote
technologies and conditions (in-person vs. remote,
actual vs. virtual, local vs. global). How can we
develop and explore new models for collaboration
using remote technology, such as "networked sound
collages" or "collaborative DAWs," that afford
greater opportunity for heterogeneous cultural
production and the creation of audiotopias? Using
the "human signal chain" as the basis for
compositional strategies that utilize the
"virtual" and the "global" (alongside the "actual"
and the "local"), this course will facilitate
ensembles that can move fluidly between in-person,
on-campus rehearsals and production lessons, and
remote, off-campus collaboration (using
collaborative DAWs that live in the cloud, like
Soundtrap), expanding ensembles to include
musicians from all over the globe. Through
projects that examine sound transmission and
transmutation, deconstruction and
decontextualization, assemblage/collage,
deterritorialization and the audiotopia, students
will work through the aesthetic, technical, and
interpersonal challenges that remote collaboration
entails.