Performance asks audiences to reconsider the world … using their ears
September 18, 2026 Kate Sweeney
Emory students, faculty, staff and the public may register in advance for one of two free sound performances, set for Thursday, Oct. 8 at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. in the Emory Student Center, Room 4. Graphic by Getty Images/Oleksandr Shchus.
On Thursday, Oct. 8, The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry will hold a free communal listening event — without music.
Attendees will sit in folding chairs in the Emory Student Center, where they will be encouraged to don eye masks for “The World According to Sound” show. The program includes 80 minutes of distinct sounds from our world reverberating through eight speakers, including the amplified audio of ants marching across a branch, 1930s Berlin street life and a choir singing in a sixth-century cathedral.
“These are things you would rarely, or never, be able to hear in your everyday life,” says Benjamin Reiss, director of the Fox Center and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English.
“And then,” says Reiss, “we’ll take off our masks and ask, ‘What did you think about that? Where did your mind go?’ It’s really about knocking you out of your usual way of going through the day and taking in information just by reacting to your surroundings.”
The Emory community and the general public may register in advance for the performances, set for 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, in the Emory Student Center, Multipurpose Room 4. The show is presented by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett, the public radio producers behind “The World According to Sound” podcast, which is dedicated to deep, intentional listening.
The campus performances dovetail with the Fox Center’s 2026-2027 theme, “Habitat,” and are part of the programming for “Attention! Reading, Focusing and Expanding Your Mind,” an interdisciplinary seminar for first-year students that Reiss and 13 other Emory faculty are teaching this semester and next.
The course considers literary, philosophical, religious and scientific approaches to attention through texts, visiting speakers and experiences like the “The World According to Sound Show.”
Other components of the curriculum include powerful literary works like Sophocles’ “Antigone” and Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” as well as works of contemporary Botswanan poetry,18th-century French philosophy, 17th-century Japanese travel writing and even a study Charles Darwin conducted describing every aspect of an earthworm’s existence.
“Distraction is really a problem that has been accelerated by new technologies,” says Reiss. “You know, it’s hard for us to disconnect — and there’s a lot of money involved in trying to capture little slices of our attention all the time.”
The seminar, he adds, goes deeper than learning to put one’s phone away to get work done.
“It’s a communal experience for first-year students,” says Reiss. “These are scholars who are just starting out in their exploration of: ‘What am I going to be curious about during my time at Emory? What’s going to drive me?’ And we really want to expand their sense of curiosity.”
The Teagle Foundation is funding the seminar as part of Emory’s “Asking the Big Questions” program, which seeks to strengthen critical thinking and other key skills in the humanities.
The “big questions” asked by the class mirror those asked by the show, says Reiss. Namely, “‘How are other people perceiving the same things that I am? And what can I learn from that?’”
