Psycho-Acoustics: Sound Control, Emotional Control, and Sonic Warfare (w/ Prof. Gascia Ouzounian)

The Samuel C. Williams Library at Stevens Institute of Technology was pleased to welcome Prof. Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, for her lecture “Psycho-Acoustics: Sound Control, Emotional Control, and Sonic Warfare” held on Wednesday, October 19 at 1pm ET. The talk explored the work of former Stevens professor Harold Burris-Meyer whose research in the mid-twentieth century investigated the use of sound as a tool for emotional and physiological control and played a critical role in the emerging fields of sound design for theater, music for industry, and applied psychoacoustics for warfare.

Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where she directs the project Sonorous Cities: Toward a Sonic Urbanism. Her work is concerned with the philosophies, technologies, and aesthetic ideologies that shape ideas of sound and space, within and across such fields as music, sound art, psychology, engineering, and urban design. She is the author of the recently published Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press 2020).

For more information on the Samuel C. Williams Library Archives & Special Collections, visit https://library.stevens.edu/archives.