Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place

What can we gather from sounding the past? This interdisciplinary art studies project will research various forms of sound from the past, and designing sound for the past, to consider what knowledge and applications can be gained from the concept, particularly within a culture and cultural history in which the visual is predominant within a segregated sensory hierarchy in mediating our perception of the world around us. Within that, this thesis proposes that the relationship between our soundscape and creative sound design can give us key information about how we listen, what we listen for, and what that can tell us. This thesis will show that this information holds benefits and contributions towards many disciplines-including art and cinema, archive studies, ethnography, and ecology-which will be investigated in-depth through practice-based research, case studies, philosophical inquiry, and a new path in sound studies connecting soundscape ecology, sound ethnography, sound art and design, and aural culture.