Music as Noise: Making Sound Art

This subject is not offered in 2016.

170 Hours

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

The notion of noise as potential music has been an enduring preoccupation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Various contexts for noise-based music include performance works, recordings, installation artworks/sound sculpture, radiophonic works and online. This subject looks at noise art’s development from the Futurists through to Cage’s and Oliveros’s experimentalism, to contemporary postmodern sound art and into the current post-postmodern era. Students will learn how to create a short sound art work in a style of their choosing, and to contextualise their creative approach within the genre’s history.

On completion of this subject students should have further developed the ability to:

• Understand and critically evaluate to a sophisticated level the history and aesthetics of the phenomenon of noise-as-music
• Demonstrate basic skills in sound art creation
• Articulate and situate their creative endeavours in this area
• Demonstrate the ability to evaluate and criticise the different ways in which people write about noise as music

• A short creative recording project (of 5 mins) - End of Semester (30%)
• A 2,500-word piece of written work reflecting on the student’s creative project - End of Semester (40%)
• 3 short written projects (300 words each) - Throughout the Semester: Weeks 4, 8, 11 (3 x 10% each: Total 30%)

• Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2013)
• Other readings, available through Readings Online via LMS

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

On completion of this subject students should possess:

• A capacity to make critical, informed and sophisticated responses to new musical ideas, methodologies and theoretical frameworks
• The ability to engage with new ideas and respond to them in a thoughtful, critical and personal way, in both written and creative platforms
• The ability to communicate effectively