The Department of Musicology hosts a guest lecture by Jennifer C. Hsieh, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

ABSTRACT

Since the earliest implementation of noise-control regulations in 1920s New York City, the governance of noise has exposed the gulf between the meaning and materiality of sound. Scholars of noise have argued that noise-control engineering ignores human hearing by measuring noise using quantitative values. While this assertion appears to close the chapter on the underlying contradictions of noise, an examination of Taiwan's management of low-frequency noise – sounds that are perceptible to the ear but undetectable by decibel meters – suggests that noise remains a contested object in terms of its classification in bureaucratic systems and the handling capacity of infrastructure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration and legislative records around the time of the 1980s democratic transition, I analyze the techno-sensorial mediation between acoustic devices, an apprehensive state apparatus, and embodied citizen hearers that shift the socio-material relations of noise governance into a mode of "hearing with the state,” one that amplifies the postauthoritarian conditions of modern-day Taiwan.

FACULTY BIO

https://lsa.umich.edu/anthro/people/faculty/socio-cultural-faculty/jchsieh.html