Duke Today has featured Sounds of the South (ENG90S.04), a course affiliated with the Audiovisualities Lab.  

Mary Caton Lingold, the instructor for Sounds of the South, is also the project director for the Sonic Dictionary.  Through a multi-course collaborative experiment the team is working to build a digital database of sounds that can be accessed and searched freely as if it were a “dictionary.”

The project was inspired by the lack of reference materials available for students and teachers of sonic material, whether musical, environmental, or technological. The collaborators are experimenting with the form of a dictionary to imagine how audio recordings can be used to enhance understanding of vocabulary related to auditory culture.

As part of the requirements for Sounds of the South, students are contributing content to the Sonic Dictionary and engaging in collaborative exhibit curation and presentation.