Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, Irina Karamarković & Deno Kaufmann, Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff & Peter Klohmann, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Burkhalter, Mostafa Taleb & Jérôme Bertier, Omarou Zongo, Darko Stanojkovski-Grappone
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Approx. 30 hours of learning materials including:
– 6 hours of video and audio
– 20 hours of reading
– 4 hours of Case studies, contextual texts, and reflective activities
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This Digital Learning Resource area introduces the theme of sustainability in relation to notions of community and urban music-making.
We prioritize a social understanding of sustainability, while also considering the environmental and economic implications of the term.
How does sound facilitate the building of social connections? How are social communities reconfigured as sonic communities? How do voices mobilize social movements? How does sound, running through musical biographies, help us to understand cultural alterity, diversity and societal transformations?
This focus on the social relevance of sound goes hand in hand with a spatial, economic and temporal dimension of sustainability, framed by global power inequalities and processes of inclusion/exclusion.
This resource draws expertise from all three of the Music4Change international research schools held in 2023, 2024 and 2025. It is in direct dialogue with Sustainable Cities and Cultures of Music (University of Groningen 2024), but also draws methods from Breaking the Sound Barrier? Diversity, Inclusion and Equity in Musical Life Research School (Grieg Academy, Bergen 2023) and builds on models from *Rethinking Interdisciplinarity and Innovation in Music Research (*Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 2025).
We have decided to provide an impulse for learning through media and accounts which reflect directly the embodied experience of musicians and thinkers in sound. It is through music itself and through emergent listening practices that wider anthropological dimensions and critical concepts such as human co-existence, reciprocity, sustainability, resilience, intercultural exchange are approached. Bringing to the fore the “voices from the field” with a focus on marginalized, muffled and often inaudible voices in the public sphere – we try to do justice to these neglected voices, while also critically problematizing the idea that audibility and visibility are always positive.