David Novak, Ph.D.,
Columbia University, Department of Music
 

David Novak received his Ph.D. in Music from Columbia University in 2006. He is an ethnomusicologist interested in articulations of cultural difference in the circulation of musical media. His work considers the distribution of popular music, sound technology, and social practices of listening as critical discourses of global modernity. His dissertation, "Japan Noise: Global Media Circulation and the Transpacific Circuits of Experimental Music," was an ethnography of Noise, an underground electronic genre emergent in US-Japan networks of musicians and listeners.

As a postdoctoral fellow, David will work on his first book, which places the modern musical avant-garde in a multi-sited context charged with specific historical and ongoing effects of locality, cultural ideology, and technological change. He will also complete a collaborative soundscape recording that documents the city of Osaka through a mix of its characteristic noises, as interpreted and recorded by some of its residents.

David has served on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and has taught at Columbia University; in 2007-2008 he will teach Asian Music Humanities and offer a graduate seminar on globalization and media.

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