“Sound and music are so much more than things that we have the vocabulary to use and talk about,” Nina Sun Eidsheim said. “There exists also the inner material vibrational practice around sound, namely the material that sound has to travel through to exist.”
On Oct. 2, the Humanities Studio at Pomona College hosted Eidsheim for a conversation on her upcoming book that discusses the work of musician and composer Wadada Leo Smith. The talk was titled, “Nina Sun Eidsheim on the Sounds, Art, & Philosophy of Wadada Leo Smith.”
Eidsheim is currently a Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Lab. In addition to her current work, Eidsheim previously published “The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music” in 2019.
This event was a part of The Humanities Studio’s annual lecture series; this year, the theme is “The Gift of Sound + Vision.” As the director of the studio, English Professor Kevin Dettmar emphasized the importance of each year’s broad themes in furthering the studio’s mission.
“We try to pick themes that don’t too narrowly focus on one part of the faculty or the curriculum,” Dettmar said. “We want people from different disciplines and different methodological perspectives.”
Each year since their establishment in 2018, Dettmar and the Humanities Studio staff have worked hard to cultivate the upstairs corner of The Hive as a space celebrating interdisciplinary study within the humanities. Their events often draw Claremont community members and students from all over the 5Cs, like Arie Lewis Pugh PO ’26.
“This year, they’ve been focusing a lot on sound, and what it means as a cultural artifact, as a technology, as something that connects us,” Lewis-Pugh said. “[Sound] is something that we each separately perceive, and that’s really interesting.”
Eidsheim’s body of work, right at the intersection of music and language, is the epitome of this year’s “Sound + Vision” theme. In her research, she often ties together scientific and psychological research with human-centered studies, drawing on visuals to illustrate her arguments.
“Eidsheim’s book demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between playing music and writing language,” Bill Boyer, a fellow at the Humanities Studio, said. “Nina is a trained singer and is keenly attuned to the phenomenology of hearing.”
Eidsheim began by discussing her interest in how aspects of our identities, such as race and gender, shape how we produce and hear sounds. As Eisheim elaborated on her point, she gave the example of one’s inability to pronounce sounds from languages that are foreign to them.
“Even when you are born, you are cultured into languages and sounds,” Eidsheim said. “The voice we have has been given to us from other voices. Even in vitro babies will know the language of the person carrying them; therefore, we are never fresh to sound.”
As she continued, Eidsheim explained that each musical sign does not tell musicians what exact sound to play, but rather provides them a starting point for musical expression. From the same set of symbols, every individual produces a different set of sounds.
Tying together her thoughts on spoken language and music, Eidsheim shared that she often thinks in images and does not try to express her thoughts through words too early. Although she recognizes that language is the currency of scholarship and would like to participate in this exchange, she’s careful not to limit her thinking to ideas that can only be expressed linguistically.
Wadada Leo Smith, the subject of Eidsheim’s latest book, is an esteemed composer and trumpet player who has spent over 50 years developing his own musical language. Instead of traditional notation, Smith’s musical language favors symbolic compositions of color, line and shape.
“Since the 1960s, Wadada Leo Smith has developed a musical philosophical language that is based on relations called Ankhrasmation,” Eidsheim said. “Everything depends on references. We can never objectively define the sounds of Wadada’s music; it is all based on references.”
In 2017, Eidsheim approached Smith, and they soon began putting his theories into words. The book, which they completed this summer, combines images and words in dialogue form. Eidsheim explained that the artistic duo chose this style in order to give readers space to reflect on the text.
Throughout her talk, Eidsheim read selections of their work to the audience. This book defies genre, blending musical theory and philosophy with biographical stories detailing their individual childhoods and relationships to music and language. There was an emphasis, both in Eidsheim’s book and her talk, of viewing one’s relationship with music — everything from single notes to entire pieces — within the context of their identity and life story.
“The sensation that you experience with sounds will be part of your history with sound,” Eidsheim said in response to one attendee’s question. “In my next project, I am trying to figure out how to write different sounds and sensations.”
As she discussed Smith, Eidsheim explained that behind each note played is a compilation of all the notes an individual has heard. Sonic expressions pull from an archive of previously heard sounds.
“I would’ve assumed that the reference would be the tempo, or the reference would be the other notes in the piece, but it was interesting for her to think of the reference as past things you’ve listened to,” attendee Lina McRoberts PO ’27 said. “So I liked that I was thinking about things in new ways.”
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