Musicology/Sound Studies: Introducing the Research Group
How do we hear music and sounds, and what does our hearing reveal about culture and society? What forms of knowledge emerge through our engagement with music and sound? How are ways of listening shaped, transmitted, and transformed? What role do the body, space, and materiality play in musical and sonic experience?
The Musicology/Sound Studies Research Group examines music and sound as dynamic, relational, and socially embedded forms of cultural practice and advocates for an interdisciplinary, contemporary, artistically oriented, and cultural studies-based approach to musicology.
About Our Working Group
"The Musicology/Sound Studies Working Group is committed to contemporary research and teaching. Our aim is to focus on music in terms of its performativity, affectivity, situatedness, and physicality. We view sounds and music as socially relevant practices, and our engagement with them takes many forms—including listening exercises, improvisations, practical reflections, and disciplinary and theory-based discourses."
Our Profile in Research and Teaching
Our research perspectives can be summarized under three thematic areas.
• Sound-oriented music research: Understanding music in terms of its sonority and deconstructing the nature of musical works; transforming Eurocentric perspectives; conceiving of sound practices as diverse and global; understanding listening as a relationship, as “sonic relations”
• Practice-based music research: Investigating sound production and experience in the act of making music (in situ); project-based sound research in urban and rural settings; local, community-based, and participatory research; focusing on “know-how”; taking into account embodied, sensory, and intuitive approaches to knowledge
• Urgent music research: Sound Studies emphasizes the situated nature of sounds and focuses on what is (in)audible or being produced, incorporating decolonial, feminist, and queer perspectives as well as issues related to sustainability and transformation research.
Our courses combine theoretical reflection with methodological openness and practical relevance. Our goal is to empower students to develop their individual artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical interests and strengths—while striving to stimulate knowledge, learning, and development from a disciplinary perspective. This includes
• the full range of meanings of (specialized) terminology, theoretical concepts, historical and contemporary phenomena, as well as methodological approaches to music- and sound-specific research,
• the ability to position oneself and to critically reflect on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion inherent in scholarly problem formulations, canonization, or work-centered approaches,
• making scholarship comprehensible as a dynamic, dialogical, contentious, and inspiring practice,
• to make theoretical concepts and historical or contemporary phenomena accessible in a practical way—that is, through active engagement—so that they can be comprehended and experienced, and
• to explore contemporary and historical subjects through an engagement with different materialities.
We work closely with the departments within the schools (and beyond) and examine the interdisciplinary intersections, particularly with the artistic disciplines. We conduct research and collaborate with Siegen’s urban community—including through SONICampus—as well as with international research institutions and partners; we facilitate and support study abroad programs and proactively continue to expand new international networks.
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