It looks as though my Sounds of Brands course as of this coming Wednesday — March 11, week 6 of 15 — will become an online course. That’s real-time online (aka a video conference), not an asynchronous online course. This is, of course, due to efforts in San Francisco to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. I had a guest speaker scheduled, but I think we’ll hold off on guest speakers until we’ve put the conference technology to the test.
And, yes, this means no chalkboard photos.
This past Wednesday, February 5, 2020, was the first class meeting of Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds: The Role of Sound in the Media Landscape, a course I’ve been teaching since 2012 in San Francisco at the Academy of Art. The course is about the ways things express themselves through sound, and by “things” I mean companies, products, services, and so forth. It can be everything from the sound design of an electric vehicle to the jingle of a fast-food restaurant to the music played in a retail establishment. How sound is employed as a form of expression in the marketplace, especially beyond the realm of pop-music storytelling, is what we explore each week.
I’m hopeful to find the time this semester to detail the class sessions here on Disquiet.com, but I also know I’ve tried and failed every semester so far. I’ve occasionally started off strong, and then the realities of teaching, and work beyond school, and life beyond all of that become reality, and the posts pretty soon fade out. I’ve documented the first week of class several times in the past, so the point of today’s post — as I get tomorrow’s class materials together — is primarily to link to those posts (2012, 2015, 2016).
To recap in brief, the course is divided into three sections, as depicted in the above chart. We spend the first three weeks on Learning to Listen (aka Listening to Media); the following six weeks on the core of the course, Sounds of Brands; and then the final six weeks on the opposite proposition, Brands of Sounds, or how things related to sound (headphones, music equipment, streaming services, record labels, etc.) express themselves in non-sonic ways.
Up top is what the blackboard looked like at the end of the first day of class. The writing seen here is a repository of notes, not a structured document. I’ll unpack some of that here:
“Sound Journal” refers to the centerpiece of the homework: writing four times a week in a diary about one’s experience of and thoughts about sound.
Below that are things like “laugh -> ha” and “keyboard -> click,” a list of a half dozen or so correlations between “things” and “the sounds things make.” That’s the result of the opening exercise in the course, when students sit for 10 minutes and write down every sound they hear. There are various things that come out of the exercise, among them an opportunity to discuss the difference between object and emission. To understand that saying “car” isn’t sufficient to describe the sound a car makes is an important lessons for a student just beginning to explore sound.
The note about onomatopoeia is pointing out that several of the things people heard (the list originated as bits of the students’ work in the exercise) that much of the description is quite literally a verbal expression of the sound. But some achieve a greater, more verbal level of detail, such as the “deep, guttural” sound of a motorcycle, and the “high-pitched, repetitive beeping” of a truck backing up.
The list in the upper left-hand corner contains elements the students noted in a series of TV commercials that, creatively, employ everyday noise sources (keyboards, pencils, coffee, books) to recreate the melody of a classic jingle.
Other terms, such as “soundscape” and “anechoic,” will be discussed more in week two, which happens tomorrow. I’ll try to get the time to report back on that class meeting, and the others as the semester proceeds. There are 15 weeks in all, 16 if you include spring break. There is one class meeting each week, and it lasts roughly three hours, a mix of lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises. Students than have nine hours of homework outside of class. If you’d like a copy of the syllabus outline, shoot me an email at [email protected].
Down the literary rabbit hole that was that Mary-Kay Wilmers (London Review of Books) profile in the New York Times, I found this logo to what is both a long-ago BBC print publication, and a superhero team-up I’d love to read (the Wireless League!).
Remains of the day. This is the blackboard at the end of the class this past Wednesday, week 11 of 15 in the undergraduate course I teach on sound in the media landscape. Week 11 marks the start of the third and final arc of the course. Arc one is “Listening to Media,” three weeks on learning to pay attention with and to one’s ears. Arc two is “Sounds of Brands,” from which the course takes its name; in it we discuss how things (companies, products, services, etc.) express themselves in sound (jingles, product design, retail design, etc.). Arc three of the course is “Brands of Sounds,” which flips the second arc on its head. We look at how things related to sound (musical instruments, headphones, streaming services, record labels, bands) express themselves in non-sonic ways. This begins with a discussion of what sound looks like. The lengthy class discussion yielded this mid-period Basquiat.
Last week I had a great opportunity to give a talk about various projects I’ve done in sound, from working on the score of Brett Marty’s science fiction film Youth with Marcus Fischer, Ted Laderas, and Paula Daunt; to teaching a course I designed for the Academy of Art here in San Francisco about the role of the sound in the media landscape; to helping a coffee shop make decisions about what music to play; to moderating the weekly compositional-prompt music community the Disquiet Junto; to editing comics for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, Red Bull Music Academy, and other publications. Those are some of the projects I walked through, and these are the title slides from my talk:
