“Are music and sound just aesthetic forms, or are they actually ways to study sociopolitical issues, how spaces and cultures are constructed, or how the physics of the world works?”
For composer–sound artist Senem Pirler, her questions are not simply rhetorical. As she explains, “We can ask questions through sound and music. We can think about music, composition, and creating artwork that is deeply curious and not just obsessed with the idea of self-expression.”
Despite their different disciplinary approaches and areas of expertise, the cohort of junior faculty in UChicago’s Music Department—which also includes musicologists Alexander Cowan and Paula Clare Harper, AB’10—shares this outlook. They locate music and sound in a broad array of auditory phenomena through which they explore wide-ranging ideas and forge interdisciplinary partnerships that help them follow the trajectories of that exploration.
Pirler’s compositions “challenge us to listen and look with our bodies at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary,” says department chair Anna Schultz, AM’95. Plankton Performance, one of Pirler’s ongoing projects, created in collaboration with artist-scientist Jess Holz, resulted in a performance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September 2025. Microorganisms from the Charles River and Boston Harbor appeared for the audience through the projected eyepiece view of a commonly used research microscope. Their presence transformed the human duo into part of a “multispecies collaboration” that fostered a “deeper conversation about plankton sound and the embodiment and agency of these creatures, rather than reducing them and their movements to actions of finding food and reproduction,” says Pirler.
During the performance, the plankton moved in real time, their paths forming a graphic score that prompted Pirler’s improvisation. In another piece in progress inspired by the natural world, she has drawn on work by physicist and feminist author Karen Barad to create an audiovisual essay that embraces the indeterminacy described by the theory of quantum entanglement.
Schultz notes that Pirler has also been expanding opportunities for students interested in “making-oriented classes” since her arrival at UChicago in fall 2024. Her brief included helping to revamp the department’s composition program into the Composition and Sound Practices program. Additionally, she has reconfigured the former CHIME (Chicago Integrated Media Experimental) Studio into the Sound Practices and Intermedia Lab (SPIL). With her changes, Pirler intends to create a more inclusive environment for sound practitioners at all levels—from undergraduates to PhD students—who are interested in thinking critically about sound together.
Pirler says she believed in forming a “symbiotic relationship” with students “by first listening to their needs and reflecting on what needs to change” when she began to make alterations to the composition program. “They were on board,” she says. “The changes are attracting a wide range of practitioners to our program” who “are thinking about composition and sound in a very expansive way.”
Many students have also been attracted to the department by Paula Harper’s teaching, which Schultz credits with having “bolstered the numbers and energy around the Music major.” Harper’s work intersects with gender and sexuality studies as well as with internet history and digital culture. She spoke with Tableau just a couple of days after turning in a book manuscript on virality to the University of Chicago Press, a major milestone in the evolution of one of two book projects she’s undertaken since her arrival at the University in 2022. The first, Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans (Routledge, 2025), was a coedited volume of essays on a breadth of topics that engaged music and contemporary digital culture through the prism of a pop megastar.
In her forthcoming monograph, Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, Harper analyzes the rise of internet and social media platforms such as GeoCities, webrings, and TikTok through the lens of musicologist Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking”—music reconfigured from a noun into a far-reaching verb that expresses elements of sonic experience ranging from creation to listening. The concept helps her analyze the internet landscape of “noisy platforms,” a heterogeneous array of social media sites, many of which began through broad sharing and engagement—the “viral participatory practices” of many digital actors. Despite the platforms’ seeming messiness, Harper charts how they have been increasingly tamed and regulated by corporate interests.
“Paula is a leading musicologist of the internet,” says Schultz. “Her scholarship brings systematicity and comprehensibility to sonic and visual objects that may otherwise seem unruly.”
The newest hire of the three, Alexander Cowan joined UChicago in Autumn Quarter 2025. His book project, currently titled “Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics,” assesses the role of ideas about musical talent and race in the American and European eugenics movement from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
Cowan reports feeling particularly grateful for the invitation to teach a graduate seminar in his first quarter, an opportunity he calls “tremendously generative for thinking about how I frame the historical research that I’ve been conducting in the last few years.” In this course offering, Music and the Human, advanced students tackled histories of music and evolutionary thought, the nature of musical ability, and the intersections of musical technique and technology, as well as technological interventions into musicality. Together, they explored “issues of music’s place in evolutionary history with these larger histories of what it means to be considered musical and how those considerations are generated socially.”
Cowan looks forward to extending the project through some future archival research that will help him gesture toward the legacy of racist ideas, “which, as we know—unfortunately—don’t go away.”
As Schultz says, Cowan’s research “pushes us to grapple with a musicological history in which eugenics and race came to be attached to music, a history that continues to reverberate in the fraught notion of ‘talent.’”
By analyzing how sound and music open up multiple spaces for artistic, humanistic, and scientific inquiry, all three scholars flourish within a department that Harper describes as particularly open to thinking broadly about how to define their object of study. “There’s a real celebration of people who are making boxes bigger, or thinking outside of them, who are thinking about the possibilities of music and its study in capacious ways.”