Sound in the 20th Century (etc.)

This summer, I’ve been enjoying teaching a course in MIT’s High School Studies Program called “Sound in the 20th Century.” (It technically goes into the 21st century, but since we’re mostly talking about developments from last century and it sounds cooler, I went with “in the 20th.”)

For my students, I put together a little website that serves as our syllabus, to collect the various links, youtube videos, etc. that I use to teach. The class pages are more like collections around a theme than a proper syllabus, but I go through them as examples to discuss in class, and they stay up as a way for interested students to share with friends or delve deeper. After class, I go back and revise to add things that came up during the day, adding things about the mosquito ringtone or the hearing stones of fish, for example. More things from class will undoubtedly end up on this blog as the program progresses.

I thought it might be a useful or interesting resource for people outside the class, so I’m sharing it here. From the index page you can check out the various classes and their themes. At the moment, the themes are: silence, tonality, voice, noise, indeterminacy, sampling, and scores. Any class that hasn’t happened yet only has a placeholder youtube video at the moment, but if you check back around the date listed in the index, the page should be live. Keep in mind that this is a pretty casual summer course for high school students with no homework, so there is a little bit of simplification for the sake of fun/breadth.

Follow along, let me know what you think, and certainly share anything you think I really need to include or got wrong.

(and a little bonus: the teaser page for the course I made on “How to Play the Piano in the 20th Century (and beyond)”)