Quiet Relations

Quiet Relations gathers eighteen scholars from across ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, and Deaf Studies to ask: in a time saturated by metaphors of empowering voices and the unjust silences, how might we listen to and for the quiet beyond binaries of sound and silence? What otherwise modes of relations might be enabled and sustained quietly? 

These eighteen scholars are, incidentally, chapter authors and co-editors of a book in the making called  Quiet Relations: A Minor Volume (under contract with Duke UP). We study the sociality, aesthetics, and heterodox politics of quiet, in order to 1) critically rethink the coupling of sound with significance and subjectivity that pervades contemporary understandings of sound and music, and 2) reflect on the shadows of sound knowledge production at the edge of our own auralities.

Quiet Relations (the symposium) is generously supported by a seed and completion grant from Duke University's Office for Research and  Innovation, with co-sponsorship from John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and enormous paperwork magic by the Music department staff. It is organized by Assistant Professor of Music Yun Emily Wang.