One might say that hearing is believing, a film’s verisimilitude being only as good as its sound. This course asks, what happens when sound—as music, speech, and environment—disrupts the epistemological dimension of the image? We are concerned for voices out of sync, voices barely audible, sounds severed from source, sounds drowning out speech, overwhelming and protracted silence, music that distorts a sense of emotional access, i.e. an acoustics of questions, not answers. In new media genres, these issues are complicated by the temporal dimension of the medium, one that is no longer running-time, but the time of archives, databases, interactivity, and movement within real visible space. We will begin with a series of foundational texts in aesthetics and epistemology, texts that negotiate the sense of hearing as a dual experience of emotion and rationality. We will then consider a series of filmmakers and media artists who offer conceptual tools with which to rethink the epistemology of listening in contrast not only to classic Hollywood paradigms, but to traditional models of what it means to “know” the world as it presents itself to human sense perception. [Tracks C, M]