These sounds are all part of our Solitude show on March 10th. Get tickets at https://www.theworldaccordingtosound.org/tickets/solitude

Solitude

Episode 1 of Ways of Knowing, an audio series about the humanities. 

Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of Jesse Oak Taylor.

Ways of Knowing: Reading

Episode 1: Storytelling was one of the earliest ways humans tried to make sense of the heavens. The first object of major study was the moon, and that's because of an uncanny ability it has to keep time.

Cosmic Visions 01: Moon Stories

Some four thousand years ago, Babylonians began collecting celestial data for what is arguably the longest-running project in the history of science.

Cosmic Visions 02: Babylonian Astrology

In the 6th Century BCE, Ancient Greeks began thinking about the cosmos in a fundamentally new way. Their novel approach led them to believe the things they saw in the night sky were not ethereal, but solid bodies—balls of fire or rock that may even have inhabitants of their own.

Cosmic Visions 03: The Beautiful Order

In the 9th century CE, Mayan astronomers were able to calculate the period of Venus down to the minute. They were only able to achieve this unrivaled accuracy because they had developed one of the most important mathematical concepts in human history, the zero.

Cosmic Visions 04: The Mayan Zero

Near the end of the 11th century CE, there was a crisis in China’s Song Dynasty. The imperial calendars were filled with errors. To fix them, the imperial court would have to reform one of the most essential institutions in the empire: The Bureau of Astronomy.

Cosmic Visions 05: Deep Patterns

"Somnium" is considered one of the first pieces of science fiction. The short story, written in 1608, recounts a trip up to the moon. There are magical beings, aliens, drugs, and a perspective of the stars that would fundamentally change how people understood the solar system.

Cosmic Visions 06: Kepler's Fiction

An observational error in the 19th century leads to a belief that there is an advanced alien civilization on Mars...which leads to a boom in astronomy investment, research, and actual discoveries, including the first sighting of Pluto.

Cosmic Visions 07: Aliens

With the telescopes of the 20th century, astronomers began to see a universe that just so happened to resemble the cosmos as described by a 13th century Italian poet…Dante Alighieri.

Cosmic Visions 08: Dante's Universe

Some of the most iconic images we have of the universe closely resemble 19th-century landscape paintings of the American West. A big part of the reason has to do with how scientists interpreted visual data from telescopes like Hubble.

Cosmic Visions 09: Picturing the Universe

The story of how gravitational waves were finally discovered and how we are making sense of them.

Cosmic Visions 10: Sonic Gravity

There's a lot to hear in outer space if you change the way you listen.

Cosmic Visions 11: Sounds of Space

The first in a 9-part series dedicated to deep, intentional listening. Episodes of "The Listening Experience" will be released about every four months.

Listening Experience 01: Transposition

We’re surrounded by media—not just when we look at our phones, turn on the TV, or get on the internet. Everything from Tupperware and office plants to buttons and smartphone apps is exerting pressure on what we think, how we think, and what is even possible to think. 

This is Media Objects, produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Media Objects: Intro

Science is not some purely rationalist endeavor that exists in an isolated realm of objective observations and hard data that can deliver absolute truths. It is built on and intertwined with the modes of analysis, intellectual history, and ways of knowing in the humanities.

0:00	Intro

2:19		Part 1 –– Metaphors We Live By

5:52		Part 2 –– Metaphors in Science, an Ancient Paradox

10:32	Part 3 –– Embryology

23:10	Part 4 –– The Clockwork Universe

32:04	Part 5 –– The History of a Dead Metaphor: Cell

44:00	Part 6 –– Black Holes

51:10	Part 7 –– The Body

57:50	Part 8 –– Pain, in 78 Adjectives

1:05:29	Part 9 –– Natural Selection

1:09:47	Part 10 –– A New Metaphor for Science

1:20:22	Part 11 –– The Solar System Model of the Atom

1:24:35	Part 12 –– Uniformitarianism

1:31:35	Part 13 –– Glia, the Gendering of a Cell

1:39:15	Part 14 –– Light Bulbs and Seeds

1:46:04	Part 15 –– War and Disease, the Domination of a Metaphor

1:51:26	Part 16 –– Social Darwinism

1:55:05	Part 17 –– The Universe

2:02:08	Part 18 –– Anthropomorphism


An Inexact Science is a production of The World According to Sound. It’s part of our series, “Ways of Knowing,” audio works dedicated to humanities research and thought. It was made in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. 

Special thanks to Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, who spearheaded the project at the University of Chicago. Editorial support from Hans Buetow. Academic advising by Andrew Hicks. Voicing work by Tina Antolini. Mathematical consultant, Steven Strogatz. Intro music by our friends, Matmos. And to see a complete list of musicians used in this show, visit our website: www.theworldaccordingtosound.org

An Inexact Science

Ways of Knowing: An Inexact Science

Media are increasingly monopolizing attention: Your mind is prevented from wandering, from generating thoughts, having associations, coming up with ideas. Over time, this dulls the creative faculties and weakens the power of imagination, which is essential for the creation of art…as well as for a clear perception of reality.

Episode guest is Radhika Koul, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. 

The Imaginary 01: Poetry of Perception

If a person spends their entire life seeing only in black and white, is it possible for them to truly know what it would be like to experience color? Philosophers have debated this for decades, but one thing they have often overlooked is the power of the imagination. It is a skill, and like any other skill it can be honed, perhaps enough to allow one to achieve deep knowledge of an experience they’ve never had.

Episode guest is Amy Kind, professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.


The Imaginary 02: The Knowledge Argument

Given the option to plug into a world totally free from conflict and struggle, most would choose to remain in their current reality. A true utopia would be too boring, stifling—with no problems to solve, there would be no outlet for creativity, for the imagination. 

Episode guest is John Farrell, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

The Imaginary 03: Utopia

While the U.S. Constitution is constantly invoked to justify how the country should be governed, it actually provides very few specifics on how that should be done. Instead, the designed ambiguities of the document require the imaginative powers of its citizenry to interpret it and decide which laws should be implemented and how they should be enforced. 

Episode guest is George Thomas, professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

The Imaginary 04: The U.S. Constitution

Writing is an extension of our voice, cars of our legs, guns of our fists, telephones of our ears, televisions of our eyes…Marshall McLuhan considered all media to be technology that extended the human body. The arrival of a medium like writing can completely reorder social relations because it has the power to “shape and control the scale and form of human association and action.” McLuhan’s idea of extensions is arguably the beginning of modern media theory, but it is not without its limitations.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests in this episode include professors Anna Shechtman, Andrew Campana, Jeremy Braddock, and Erik Born.

Media Objects 01: Extensions

While extensions are masculine coded and deal with tools that extend what human beings already do, containers offer a different and more feminine concept of media: something that selects, stores, and processes information. Containers primarily allow for preservation, but this goes far beyond things like food, water, or other materials. They also determine cultural and intellectual production. For a primer on how to think about the way objects around us select, store, and process information, we’re going to consider one of America’s most iconic objects of containment: Tupperware.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests in this episode include professors Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer.

Media Objects 02: Containers

We increasingly interact with the world through the binary, on/off medium of buttons—from keyboards and appliances, to the digital interfaces of phones and tablets; but it didn’t have to be this way. “There is nothing natural or inevitable about buttons or the act of pushing a button. Various constituencies over the years—especially advertisers and manufacturers—have marshalled tremendous resources to make buttons popular and alluring,” Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guest in this episode is Cornell professor Roger Moseley.

Media Objects 03: Buttons

Text written with a typewriter is not the same as text written by hand, composed on a computer, sent in a text message, or generated by artificial intelligence. Like all media, the typewriter does not just transmit what a person wants to write. It is its own particular medium. In the 20th century, it changed the way writers write and the way people read—profoundly altering warfare, commerce, literature, and, perhaps most dramatically, gender relations.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Media Objects 04: Typewriters

With today’s so-called generative artificial intelligence, we’re being told that we have finally arrived. We’re now beginning to build true “thinking machines,” machines that will do everything a human can do, only better, faster, and more efficiently. This will change every aspect of our lives, for good…or for bad. Either way, there’s no turning back. We can’t stop generative AI. Only learn to live with it.

This is not true. Today’s machines are far more powerful than those in the past, but their so-called “intelligence” is not like yours or mine.

The belief that they can or soon will become "intelligent" is a myth being used to obscure what so-called generative AI actually is, how it works, and what the companies behind it are really up to. AI companies are using the hype around artificial intelligence to build computer infrastructure, rewrite laws, and alter norms that will fundamentally change how we work, recreate, communicate…And ultimately, how we think about what it means to be human.

None of this is inevitable. The changes being brought on by so-called generative artificial intelligence are not the result of some forward march of technological progress, but instead of decisions and values that we all have a say in.

This is Media Objects. A Ways of Knowing podcast. Produced by the World According to Sound, in partnership with Media Studies at Cornell University. Support from the college of arts and science and the society for the humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests include Cornell professors Gili Vidan and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.

Media Objects 05: Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1

In the previous episode, we heard how so-called artificial intelligence is being sold to the public as a revolutionary, inevitable technology that is going to completely transform society. This claim is built around the misleading metaphor of “artificial intelligence,” which equates machine processes with human intelligence. Generative AI products are being marketed as proof that machines will very soon be doing everything a human can do, but better, faster, and more efficiently. We’re being told we can’t stop this technology. Only learn to live with it. 

In this episode, we’re going to show how so-called generative AI is not revolutionary. Instead, it’s an evolution of societal trends that have been a long time in the making and which were not inevitable…Things like the automation of labor, growth of mass media, and vast increases in monopoly power. By understanding this context we can get a much clearer picture of what so-called generative AI actually is, what the companies behind it are really up to, and all the ways it can affect our lives.

This is Media Objects. A Ways of Knowing podcast. Produced by the World According to Sound, in partnership with Media Studies at Cornell University. Support from the college of arts and science and the society for the humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests include Cornell professors Steven Jackson, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Daniel Susser, Lee Humphreys, and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.

Media Objects 06: Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2

Episode 1 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities.

Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of English and Data Science Anna Preus.

Ways of Knowing 01: Digital Humanities

Episode 2 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities.

Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of French Richard Watts.

Ways of Knowing 02: Paratext

Not all of America takes kindly to Trump's ban of immigrants.

62 – American Unrest: Immigration Ban Protest 1/28/17

33 percent of America's electricity comes from coal. You're probably using energy generated from that black rock right now. It's extracted from the ground by guys like Mackie Branham.

63 – Coal Miner

New ways of thinking about the world, brought to you by the humanities and The World According to Sound. 

We’re working with universities to translate academic research into sound. Each season has a radically different format and topic. You’ll never hear the same kind of thing twice.

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