MUS 256 - Sensing the Amazon: Sound, Song, and Image

What is the Amazon? How have we been listening to it? Can we sense (and make sense of) its devastation and abundance from far away? The Amazon is a complex region, home to diverse social groups and modes of living. This course takes the Amazon as a case study for engaging in sound, song, and audiovisual productions in terms of the ethics of their making, the imaginaries they propose, and the places they create. Through texts and multimedia material about/from the Amazon and listening and recording exercises, students will examine clashing and coexisting sensorial histories of the region and critically engage with how the Amazon is perceived as forest, home, resource, and nature under threat.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).