The World According to Sound
An Immersive Audio Experience
“The show serves as a portal…where sound waves shapeshift into unfolding landscapes.” -Hyperallergic
“Chris and Sam are on a mission to bring listeners the most interesting sounds on the planet.” -WBEZ
“The sounds may be provocative on their own, but they wouldn’t be the same in solitude.” - New York Magazine
Video of a performance at The New School, made by Pushpin Films
Welcome to The World According to Sound. You’ve probably never done anything like this before. We set up a ring of loudspeakers and chairs for 100 to 200 people. You come. You sit. You put an eye mask on. The lights go off and the sonic trip begins. There is no multitasking. No distractions. Nothing to see. Instead, you just listen, in the dark, with others.
The World According to Sound is made by us, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. We have worked in public media for 20 years. We contributed to the biggest national programs, won various awards, and in 2020 produced NPR’s most listened to story of the year. But we became dissatisfied. Everything we were making was starting to sound exactly the same…and feel like it had the same intent: to capture and capitalize on your attention.
We wrote about this phenomenon in an academic paper. We did a residency at Cornell University. We created a podcast that broke conventions, and made another about humanities research. We turned those programs into a series of live shows on topics ranging from birds to bodies, from time to transposition. People seemed to like them. Academics even wrote about them.
We’ve since performed and lectured at over 75 colleges and universities, including Brown, Berkeley, Bucknell, BU, IU Bloomington, and many more that do not start with the letter B. We’ve collaborated with sound artists, academics, and musicians like Matmos, The Kronos Quartet, Chris Watson, Hildegard Westerkamp, Trevor Pinch, and Barry Truax. The New York Times calls our work “Immersive.” The Washington Post calls it “Spine-Tingling.” More importantly, after one of our shows a first-year undergraduate said, “the show gave me a new perspective through which to interpret the world, which in my opinion is the ultimate learning experience one can hope to have.”
For a taste of what we do, take a listen to Transposition. As always, listen with headphones! Hope to see you at a show soon.