![]() ![]() ![]() The culmination of the course is an on-going project to develop “Humboldt Kits” to be used in North and South American schools named for Humboldt, some of which have large minority and disadvantaged enrollments. ![]() The Humboldt focus does allow attention to the literary classics, but also to the philosophy, art, science, and politics of the time. Instead of studying only the literary classics of that time, the group follows the great early-19 th C German explorer and polymath scholar Alexander von Humboldt as he travels throughout the New World, while also observing how the New World, in the person of Jefferson, explores the Old World. The “Humboldt Project” is a radical transformation of the hoary “Age of Goethe” course that is practically universal in German major programs. (The company “SpeakEasy” produces language-related products for travelers.) The course “SpeakEasy: German Business Simulation” is conducted as a business, ranging from personnel and management activities through product design, production, and sales and marketing. The German SF course is one of three innovative upper-level courses I have created at PSU. It is intended to demonstrate several facets of humanities education and language pedagogy: interdisciplinary studies, the interaction of science and technology with the arts, team-based learning, and language learning that is founded on communicative competence and content-based instruction. The second “Papa Joe” binaural recording was made by students as part of an advanced German course at Portland State University. 3) “Papa Joe & Co.” is inconceivable without the technical advances of German audio engineering at the time, and also without the well-developed nexus of producers and consumers of serious SF, and of well-funded radio drama as part of the larger “highbrow” literary scene in the German-speaking world of the 1970s. 2) Franke’s work takes binaural stereo beyond mere production technique, making it the central theme of his story: mind control in a mass-culture dystopia. I will argue that the original Kunstkopf production can be regarded, for several reasons, as a classic work of SF, and particularly of German SF: 1) Franke’s short story “Papa & Joe” originated in response to an invitation by Bavarian Broadcasting to produce an original work of SF that would realize the potential of binaural stereo. ![]() Franke (1927-), the most prominent author of German science fiction. The presentation will focus on two recordings of the radio-drama (Hörspiel) “Papa Joe & Co.” (1976) by Herbert W. When the recording an everyday street environment, a concert, a dramatic performance is played back over stereo earphones, listeners hear the sound as though they themselves were in the original head location, with not only direction but distance as clear acoustic dimensions. Briefly put the presentation will demonstrate it with “homebrew” equipment anyone can put together binaural sound is produced by placing mini-microphones at or near the eardrum locations on a real or realistic human head (even one’s own!). The technique, which is not to be confused with quadraphonic sound or later artificially-produced “surround sound,” was explored elsewhere too, and there is a present-day subculture of binaural fans and producers. Binaural or “synthetic head” stereo is a naturalistic three-dimensional audio recording technique that was developed intensively as “Kunstkopfstereophonie” by German broadcasting institutions during the 1970s and 1980s. ![]()
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