The Music/Sound discipline welcomes emerging artists in composition, improvisation, performance, sound installation, sound sculpture, audio activism, and other forms of sonic engagement. Offering a critical approach to experimental sound practice, the department seeks to move away from an exclusively technical/formal conversation and toward consideration of the full gamut of contextual and historical forces at work in the production and reception of the sonic arts. Buoyed by one-on-one conversation, hands-on instruction, group critique, and caucus meetings, students are challenged to formulate and develop rigorous, idiosyncratic methodologies for both producing and framing their own work.
The department's long-term commitment to the post-Cagean lineage is unique, having been host to such seminal figures as Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Richard Teitelbaum, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and many others. The work and thought of Maryanne Amacher, a long time member of the faculty until her passing in 2009, is exemplary of the engagement with sound which the program strives to encourage: complexly, provocatively, and meticulously navigating the boundaries of genre and classification. Dialogue with such lineages as well as with other vernaculars is understood as an opening into a rich, interdisciplinary understanding of the sonic in the broadest and yet most specific sense. Emphasizing hybrid practices, the program offers an approach which neither reduces sound to a sub-category of contemporary art production nor enforces any institutional idea of a “contemporary” music.
Music/Sound is based in the Edith C. Blum Institute and the Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts, which together provide individual studios, performance and exhibition spaces, a recording studio, and an electronic music studio, which features vintage analog synthesizers such as the Serge Modular Synthesizer and Arp 2600, as well as digital audio environments including Pro Tools and Logic. An electronic music workshop allows for the design and construction of electronics in many forms, from basic circuitry to the programming of microcontrollers and sensors. Professional performers may be hired as resources for Master's Thesis presentations.