Here we present a collection of critical media responses to the Hearing Modernity lectures and discussions of the 2013-14 Sawyer Seminar. Over the course of the year, graduate students met in a parallel seminar with Dr. Alexander Rehding (Music 230R) to discuss the core texts of each of the the seminar presenters and contextualize their work in the development of sound studies as an emerging field. The graduate seminar had the additional goal of producing experimental critical media responses to the events of the Sawyer Seminar. Each Sawyer Seminar event featured two speakers, whose projects and conclusions sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted. Graduate students met with presenters and then developed a series of critical media projects to synthesize, contest, respond to, or re-envision the themes of the discussion. Each project responds to the Sawyer events in a different register and with approaches to audiovisual experimentation. Graduate students also wrote textual summaries and responses to the events, which can be read on the Soundblog of the Hearing Modernity site.
–T. Brandon Evans and Caufield Schnug, guest editors