Resonance

"The firehose" is a metaphor born at MIT that conveys the speed and volume of available information – yet it also imagines a flow that necessarily rushes by and risks putting out the fire of curiosity. This project aims to address the need for deeper, sometimes slower thinking, through an intense but thoughtful encounter with the richness of scholarship generated by a research university. By means of a cross-disciplinary subject we hope to stoke the intimate and cumulative processes that Goethe celebrated as "tender empiricism."

This pedagogical inquiry directly addresses the concept of "subject" that underscores the educational organization of MIT "courses" as disciplinary regimes. This project proposes to renovate subject as a rubric that can cut across courses, while nonetheless conveying the rigor with which different fields approach a common topic. In this case, the thematic topic is Resonance which will explore sonic phenomena from various acoustic, biological, cultural, technological, historical, and cognitive perspectives. Students will engage with the material together in the classroom, but will be required to produce a personal final research project to consolidate their learning and further hone distinctive inter-, trans-, and disciplinary interpretations of the acoustic.