The seminar proposes to engage with sound and listening as transversal practices being heterogeneous, uncertain, wandering and permanently transforming. By investigating different sonic methodologies to think sound and listening from the intertwined fields of sound studies, sounding arts and auditory cultures, the aim of the seminar is to investigate two specific strands: Firstly, the course will focus on trying to reflect the emergence of an essentialist und universalizing modernist listening subject that possibly resulted in producing listening regimes and auditory mythologies establishing normative canons throughout past and present histories. Secondly, and as an attempt to propose alternative sonic narratives, the seminar will engage with attentive listening as a manifold practice to investigate the affective qualities that the encounter with sound might produce. By exploring different concepts around the Nomadic Ears, the participants will attempt to develop transdisciplinary auditory approaches as many experiments to listen otherwise. A particular emphasis of the course will focus the relations between sound and listening to historical, technological, ecological and socio-political contexts.

The course will be structured in a double articulation: By engaging in close-reading of current literature by sound scholars and artists, the participants will investigate the actual discourses and positions within the sound studies field. Among other papers, a specific object of examination will be the recently published “Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies” reflecting multiple perspectives on sound and listening from a broad range of disciplines. In yet another articulation of the course, and echoing discussions around sonic theoretical concepts, the participants will practice deep listening to different adventurous artworks like sound art, field recordings and experimental music. A selection of guests from both scientific and artistic international communities will round-up the possibility to approach the seminar as a collective platform for exchanges and discussions about current adventurous sonic research and practice.

Throughout the whole seminar, the participants will try to conceptualize sound as an embodied affective presence that permits the emergence of (un)heard human and non- human voices. Like an infinite and permanently modulating reverberation, the nomadic ears echo the noises and silences of past, present and future sonic histories.