Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:00am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Environments Session Chair: Sabine Feisst | |
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Spectrogram Senses: Towards an Environmental History of Sound and Heat King's College London In 1824, Joseph Fourier published a paper entitled “Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (General Remarks on the Temperature of the Earth and Planetary Spaces) in which he imagined the surface of the globe as an interface between the immense heat of the earth’s core and the variable influence of the sun. It was one of the earliest articulations of the greenhouse effect, penned by a mathematician known best for his work in the field of “harmonic analysis.” Here Fourier developed a technique for the decomposition of waveforms that could reveal distributions of intensity across the spectrum of possible frequencies, a technique which came to be known as the Fourier Transform. It and the Fast Fourier Transform, a practice formalized much later by James Coolly and John Tukey in 1965, are now routinely used by acousticians, engineers and musicians in the analysis of sound waves and are central to emerging practices of so-called machine listening. Building on recent work on the place of music within a broader history of waveform analysis (Jessop 2017; Bijsterveld 2018), this paper focuses on Fourier’s legacy in the world of digital technologies since 1970, particularly in astrophysics in which spectrographic “soundings” of sunlight provide the basis for global temperature monitoring, notably in NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. It asks what histories and political tendencies are contained in the use of such music-adjacent vocabularies: how terms like “sounding” and “harmonic analysis” construct and influence environmental knowledge. At the same time, it makes the case for engaging with mathematical concepts as a productive means of decentring sound across music studies. For example, Steven Feld (2024) has recently advanced an acoustemology of heat; along related lines, sound might be understood through its epistemological entanglements with heat as interrelated forms of environmental sensing. Historical relationships between sound and heat waves also invite reflection on the politics of scientific knowledge in the climate crisis as humanities scholars increasingly strive to extend their senses, through sensors, to think across inhuman scales. | |