MUSIC 10N: Bad Sounds
General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
Can music and sound be labeled as either “good” or “bad”? This seminar challenges inherited assumptions about music’s presumed goodness. We consider the notion of “bad sounds” from a variety of perspectives: socio-political, economic, ethical, as well as through the lens of aesthetic theory. We unpack the value judgments: What shapes our aesthetic perceptions of music and sound? What do we deem good, bad, beautiful, ugly, sublimely incomprehensible, or intolerably inscrutable, and why? How do sounds accrue positive or negative associations? How are music and sound deployed for good or bad?
We consider music’s “badness” through discussion of the aesthetic hierarchies that emerge through the commodification of popular music or jazz. In contexts and genres as disparate as state propaganda, the use of music as an instrument of torture, and heavy metal, we look at how music’s power can be co-opted for dangerous political agendas. We consider instances where racialized sound is labeled as noise in gentrified spaces, as low-brow commodity forms, or as dangerous to the hegemony of dominant culture. Over the course of the quarter, through close listenings (to recordings and live performance) and critically reading scholarly, political, and popular discourses about music, we learn to unravel the complexities of music’s moral and ethical valences.
Meet the Instructor: Ioanida Costache
“As an ethnomusicologist, I am fascinated by the crucial role music plays in how we make sense of and build our worlds. I am excited about this course as it traces the processes of signification and resignification sound is subject to—processes that are mediated by social, political, and economic factors and that constantly change how sound matters to us and what sound means. In my scholarly work on the racialization of Romani people—a diasporic racial group from Northern India—I’ve seen how music, musicality, and sound influence how Roma are interpellated in contexts where they’re marked by Otherness. More specifically, my research traces how Roma have used music to process racialized trauma. In addition to being a scholar of Romani art, music, and sound, I am also a musician and an artist. My video and sound art has been exhibited at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York City, at Tides Gallery in San Francisco, at the Botanical Gardens Gallery in Bucharest, Romania, and at the 2022 Roma Exhibition Collateral Event at the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.”
