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(Re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures in Colombia, 1886-1930.

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318 pages

Title
  • (Re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures in Colombia, 1886-1930.
Date modified
  • 08/21/2025
Creator
Abstract
  • Urban contexts have attracted increasing attention in Ethnomusicology, the History of Science, Cultural and Urban Studies, and sound studies. However, and despite some recent studies focused on the experiences of sound and space in the Global South, the study of urban aural transformation is still restricted to North American and Western European cities. This dissertation contributes to those studies from musicological, sociological, and historical perspectives, studying the processes driving the transformation of the listening and sounding cultures in Colombian cities between 1886 and 1930, a period of early modernization of the country. Through the analysis of documentary sources including the press, maps, musical scores, travelogues, and legislation, this dissertation studies the Colombian postcolonial city as a case that illustrates relevant characteristics and contradictions within postcolonial soundscapes and urban modernization processes, revealing that multiple, contradicting, and changing understandings of sounding and listening were a significant part of the experience of urban modernization that shaped postcolonial cities. The five chapters of this dissertation explore urban modernization and the transformations of cultures of listening and sounding in seven Colombian cities. By analyzing the semiprivate spaces of salons and ballrooms (chapter 2), the public spaces of squares and parks (chapter 3), the role of musical education and the reconfiguration of musical labor (chapter 4), and the changes introduced by the first forms of mechanical reproduction of music (chapter 5), this dissertation reveals that, while the elites and governmental institutions promoted listening and sounding as a means for establishing social order, the citizens’ experiences of urban spaces and technologies diverged from this instrumental use of sound in ways that transformed sounding and listening into means for contesting the disciplinary logic of the “modern urban space.” Thus, the Colombian case calls into question assumptions about urban modernization as a uniform linear process in which the adoption of technologies tends to create a unique ontology of sound, supported by the logic of technological advance and increased productivity.
Administrative Note
Date created
Identifier
Keyword
Language
Resource type
Degree discipline
  • Music
Degree grantor
  • University of Pittsburgh
Degree level
  • Doctoral
Degree name
  • Doctor of Philosophy
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MLA citation style (9th ed.)

Velasquez Ospina, Juan Fernando. (re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures In Colombia, 1886-1930. . 2018. d-scholarship.pitt.edu/concern/etds/6bed846e-cf82-45bf-b7a1-942a3d2c3d29.

APA citation style (7th ed.)

V. O. J. Fernando. (2018). (Re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures in Colombia, 1886-1930. https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/concern/etds/6bed846e-cf82-45bf-b7a1-942a3d2c3d29

Chicago citation style (CMOS 17, author-date)

Velasquez Ospina, Juan Fernando. (re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures In Colombia, 1886-1930. 2018. https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/concern/etds/6bed846e-cf82-45bf-b7a1-942a3d2c3d29.

Note: These citations are programmatically generated and may be incomplete.

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