Sound Art and the City: Mapping Sound and Urban Space in the Americas is a special exhibition by Cornell's Department of Music, held in conjunction with a departmental conference on the same theme. The conference brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields and disciplines to discuss the political economy of sound in the configuration of urban space. It approaches the city from a multidisciplinary perspective that centers on the experience of sound as a critical component in the performance of the social, cultural, and political subjectivities and objectivities of the urban. Topics will include historico-juridical organization of sound in the Americas, sonic demarcations of racialized, classed and gendered space, traveling rural sounds in the city, experiments in sonic alternatives in art as well as in everyday life, popular music cultures as world-making practices, comparative analysis of sonic urban space, and the sonority of speech (from volume to stylization). The exhibition will feature three artists whose work reflects upon the uses of sound as a political, aesthetic, and artistic exploration of the city.

Cosponsors include: College of Arts and Sciences, Society for the Humanities, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Department of Romance Studies, Latin American Studies Program, and AAP.