ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the interdisciplinary nature of sound work, as well as education. The residential college (RC) was in its 10th year of existence. Set within a large public university, it was home to classrooms, faculty offices, and a variety of specialized spaces—an art gallery, an art studio, music practice rooms, a theater, a media center, and other spaces for collaborating. A soundscape, analogous to a landscape, is an acoustic composition that “consists of events heard not objects seen”. Similarly, to earwitness means that one can attest to what one has heard. Through considering, capturing, and composing sounds of the community, generations of students, faculty, and alumni might instead listen back on the RC’s history to earwitness echoes of ecologies across time. In turn, listeners are well positioned to identify how such sounds resonate across generations. In short, sound was a tool to make the familiar strange through the holistic experience of attuning to the local community.
