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This course provides students an introduction to the discipline of sound studies and its relationship to three eras of historical forms of technological media. Structured around a problematic of emitter, medium, and receiver, it explores how sound was encoded by its creators as a structure of meaning in early media cultures; how it emerged as a means of aesthetic creation with the rise and dominance of the cinematic medium; and last, how it reaches the infatuated individual listener in the new era of mobile earbud audio. Theorizing our relationship to media through the study of sound and listening, we find new histories to be explored, as well as new media aesthetics to be negotiated. Through engagement with thinkers such as economist Jacques Attali, auditory and cultural historians Emily Thompson and Jonathan Sterne, film sound theorists Michel Chion and Rick Altman, and sound studies scholar Michael Bull, we construct how technologically mediated listening allows us to understand the historical and theoretical components of sound’s media aesthetics. Recommended Course Background: AS.061.245 for undergraduates or JHU graduate student status (open to all JHU graduate students).