Events in UCIS

Wednesday, September 7

4:30 pm Lecture
The Emergence of "Noise" in Industrial Japan: An/aesthetic Strategies for Factory Management
Location:
211 David Lawrence Hall or online via Zoom
Sponsored by:
Asian Studies Center
See Details

In this first lecture of the Asia Now 2022 fall lecture series, Dr. Keisuke Yamada and Dr. Andrew Niess discuss how early twentieth-century Japanese intellectuals, policymakers, and bureaucrats understood the nexus of sound, music, and labor in industrial management. Japanese authors considered how to contend with sō-on (noise) in factories, which, for managers, threatened productivity. We trace the development of kōjō ongaku (factory music) in response to sō-on in the context of the development of industrial management theory, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management.” We demonstrate how such management strategies are aesthetic, in contrast with anaesthetic ones like soundproofing. Through this an/aesthetic framework, we analyze the global historical processes surrounding noise abatement and factory music as part of modern industrial management. To register to attend this event via Zoom, click here.

Bios:

Keisuke Yamada (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2020) is a Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Supercell Featuring Hatsune Miku (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). His other peer-reviewed work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asian Music, the Asia-Pacific Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum, Japan Forum, Japanese Studies, the Journal of Japanese Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology, among others.

Andrew Niess, PhD is an independent researcher, editor, and instrument maker. He received the 2020–21 Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. His publications are forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, Ecopedagogies: Practical Approaches to Experiential Learning (Routledge, 2022), and the Journal of Japanese Studies.