CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City

The subject of this semester's class was "Listening to the City", under an umbrella course entitled "Creative Communities" at Columbia College Chicago. And little did we know, when the semester began, just how creative a community we would have to become! When the COVID-19 crisis hit, students barely managed to grab their sound recording devices before dispersing across the nation and beyond. After April 9, when they magically re-appeared on my screen, listening to "the" City of Chicago became listening to a plurality not only of cities, but also of rural areas, states, countries, and in fact continents. The physicality of soundwalks through the Harold Washington Library earlier in the semester gave way to a technologically mediated listening experience on Zoom - a tool that gives instructors the frightening ability to "Mute All" students (think about that for a second). But even though we may at times have felt doomed and zoomed, we would not let ourselves be muted! The fruits of that labor we proudly share here with you. For their final projects, students have paired up to record their respective sound environments at the same time every day over a period of two weeks. They then edited the resulting recordings into a series of soundscape studies that vividly demonstrate how a shared experience of sound shapes community - whether in a classroom or across distances, whether in "real" or "virtual" space.

--- Florian Hollerweger

CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City’s tracks

• Kaitlyn Neeley – Stuck in Limbo (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Nova Centeno – N Harlem Ave Ambience (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Nathan Garduno – Quiet Beginnings to Quiet Ends (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Paola Nuno & Eduardo Sanchez – Free Flow (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Christopher Rivers – Covid19 Spring 2020 (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Carlos Salguero – Walking through Life (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Damon Silvert – Storm and Outdoor Tones of the Suburbs (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Robert Fornari – Pandemic: Finding Shelter while in Place (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City
• Hannah Davis – Subtleties of Covid (2020) by CCCX 299-06 Listening To The City