“Media Objects,” a podcast collaboration between Cornell media experts and sound artists The World According to Sound, begins Feb. 6 with the drop of the first episode, “Extensions.”
Four more episodes on “Containers,” “Buttons,” “Typewriters,” and “Artificial Intelligence” will be released throughout February. The five-episode series features the voices and research of thirteen Cornell faculty members, more than half from the College of Arts and Sciences, in addition to scholars from the University of Toronto and Indiana University.
Listen to the "Media Objects" season trailer!
“We are really excited to share this work with you,” said Jeremy Braddock, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S) and chair of the CIVIC Media Studies Initiative.
The fifth season of World According to Sound’s podcast Ways of Knowing, “Media Objects” amplifies Cornell research in a wide variety of disciplines and highlights Cornell’s leadership in the field of media studies.
“It’s asking listeners to consider that what we typically mean by the concept of media – newspapers, radio, TV, film – is much smaller than what media and mediation actually do in our world, and that all of these media — even “new media” like artificial intelligence, have histories that are crucial to know,” Braddock said. “That has been one of the foundational ideas that’s driven media studies at Cornell.”
Cornell media studies scholars, including Erik Born, assistant professor of German studies (A&S), Paul Fleming, the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities (A&S), and Braddock, advised the episodes.
The World According to Sound co-creators Chris Hoff ’02 and Sam Harnett consider each episode of Media Objects to be a separate “sonic essay.”
“Instead of an academic paper or a news piece or a podcast, you’re listening to a sonic representation of an idea,” Harnett said. “It’s kind of a translation. We take the ideas and thoughts in the academic work, and we find the ways in sound to represent them.”
Harnett and Hoff make sound works that are unique – not your typical interview podcast or narrative radio show.
For example, the “Media Objects” episode about “Containers,” inspired by an essay by Cornell communications scholar Brooke Erin Duffy and University of Toronto scholar Jeremy Packer, is an audio collage featuring music and archival audio from 1980s Tupperware parties. It also includes an interview with Duffy, associate professor in the Department of Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty (A&S).
The episodes aim to evoke as well as explain, Hoff said.
“We might tell you a big idea, but we’re going to come at that idea five different ways sonically that make you think. It allows you to think about, say, containment in a way that an academic paper just can’t. Audio can do things writing can’t. We’re trying to tap into that.”
During their 2019 residency at Cornell, Braddock introduced the duo to a BBC television program from the 1970s, “Ways of Seeing.” They said that this experience, combined with their semester of engagement with Cornell scholars from many disciplines, planted the seeds of Ways of Knowing in their minds.
The first Ways of Knowing season, done in partnership with the University of Washington, introduces different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities. Further seasons focus on other universities, including a look at science and metaphor at the University of Chicago and a humanistic history of astronomy with Johns Hopkins University.
But returning to Cornell is like coming back home for Hoff and Harnett, they said. The Cornell season circles back to the place that inspired the series in the first place.
“There are moments when these podcasts are quite impressionistic, as if to say, let’s listen to what Tupperware containers sound like or what would it mean for a typewriter to be a musical instrument,” said Braddock. “But the pieces also have real arguments that are grounded in the kinds of research we do at Cornell, and we think that listening to them will make you want to explore further.”
