Date: 27 October 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:30–6:00 pm
Venue: LG04, Hui Yeung Shing Bldg., CUHK

Speaker: Prof. Holger Schulze
Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen

Delivered in English | All are welcome | No pre-registration required | Limited seats, first come, first served

Co-hosted by RIH Interdisciplinary Reading Group “Weaving Narratives, Curating Stories: Engagements with Critical Heritage Studies”
Coordinated & Co-moderated by Lei Yusheng

About the talk:

Sound is ephemeral. Or so we think. Literature, on the other hand, can last forever. But can it? Do works of poetry really last that long? In their written form, certainly – but orally?
Sound has been archived and stored for about 160 years, and so has the sound of spoken words, political speeches, poetry readings. Can we imagine sound works that actually serve
as a kind of memorial? Is it possible to produce a digital artifact in sound to support national memory?

In this talk, I analyze and discuss the potential of two digital artworks that employ language, advanced sound production, as well as online distribution formats to relate to the memory of violent historical events as well as to an actually utopian cultural endeavor: Memory Loops (2008) by artist and performer Michaela Melián and Audio.Space.Machine – Ein Bauhaus-Konzeptalbum (2019) by author and actor Christian Wittmann and composer and performer Georg Zeitblom.

Both works stage archival sources, sonically as well as spatially; both were produced and presented within a context of national memory. They carry their historical contexts of production not only in the choice of material, but also in the digital technologies they use. Studying these two works and how their producers worked with and staged historical sources, allows to assess and maybe to answer the question of the title: how to remember, sonically?

About the speaker:

Holger Schulze is professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His sonic anthropology explores how sounds and listening in the 21st century stabilize, disrupt, and permeate everyday life. Artistic practices and everyday objects are both of equal concern to his sonic critique. As one of three editors-in-chief of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies, (along with Jennifer Stoever and Michael Bull) he fosters and disputes the pluriform artistic and scholarly research that emerged since he co-founded the world’s first master’s program in Sound Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2006. His publications include: Meme Music (2026), Sonic Fiction (2020), The Sonic Persona (2018)