Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Photo by Jason Koski: Chris Hoff, left, and Sam Harnett install a listening booth on the Cornell Arts Quad

After four sold out performances at Cornell, The World According to Sound brings their hour-long surround sound live experiences to the Cherry Artspace. Listeners sit in darkness, surrounded by a ring of eight powerful loudspeakers, awash in sounds. The first night features the duo's iconic assemblage of sounds from all over the world, and the second night presents their brand-new piece: a sonic exploration of the Cornell campus. After a decade of working in public radio, creators Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff set out to do something that should not have been radical — to create radio focused on sound, not stories or information. So they launched The World According to Sound, a 90-second radio show that has played on NPR and been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times and on HowSound. The pair went on to turn their podcast into a touring, communal listening event, and this fall, created a second piece as artists-in-residence at Cornell University.

On the first night, you will hear bridges and ants and the gurgle of mud pots. The sounds will transport you inside another person's head, to the reverberant inner chambers of the Hagia Sophia, and back in time a hundred years to the streets of Berlin. The sounds in the show include a musical performance by a washing machine, a symphony of athletic grunts, and the disturbing howl Marco Polo heard while crossing the Gobi Desert. The second night will go deep into the sounds of Cornell. For one semester, Sam and Chris listened to a particle accelerator, conversational Latin, and the stomach of a cow; to 19th-century kinetic machines, the mechanics of a pipe organ, and the stomp of step dancing; to hockey skates, taiko drums, and fencing sabres; to research on mating spiders, vibrating deserts, dying plants, and outer space; to wire recordings, records, film reels, cassettes, and VHS tapes hidden in underground archives. It will be a university in a way you've never experienced one before. Chris Hoff was the senior sound engineer on KALW's news magazine Crosscurrents for over a decade. Now, when he's not doing The World According to Sound, he freelances on numerous radio shows and podcasts.

Sam Harnett reports on technocapitalism for KQED public radio in San Francisco. He's a regular contributor to national programs like Morning Edition, The World andMarketplace.

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