The World According to Sound
The World According to Sound was born out of a mixture of boredom and dissatisfaction, those two great movers of things.
After years making public radio stories that all sounded almost exactly the same, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett set out to do something different. Their goal was to create media that did not rely solely on narrative, information, or character. Instead of trying to entertain or inform, they wanted to generate some space for people to think for themselves.
They began with a tiny show, just 90-seconds long, in which they presented sounds with as little narration as possible--just enough context for the listener to engage with the sound and have their own thoughts and associations. They produced episodes on mud pots, ants, bridges, musical washing machines, giraffes, sand dunes, metronomes, and all manner of field recordings, sound art, archival recordings, and sonified data. After a hundred episodes, they again grew tired--this time of working in stereo, just two channels, and of engaging only with people listening by themselves. They decided to take the sounds from the series, remix them for a ring of eight speakers, and put on a live show. The audience would sit in the dark, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a communal sonic trip that asked them to rethink the world through their ears instead of their eyes. Thus, The World According to Sound came to be.
Over the last decade, Hoff and Harnett have toured, published academic papers, worked as practitioners-in-residence, and continued to produce format-breaking audio series and documentaries. The have collaborated with musicians, sound artists, and academics like Matmos, The Kronos Quartet, Chris Watson, Hildegard Westerkamp, Trevor Pinch, and Barry Truax. Their latest project is Ways of Knowing, an ongoing series in which they partner with colleges and universities to turn contemporary humanities research into compelling audio. They have turned that audio work into one of their traveling, octophonic live shows, with which they are now touring the country.