I take stock of a range of cultural products in order to look across different types of boundaries.

Seeking to understand how sound worlds-understood as both the sounds of the world and as composer-created вЂњworlds of soundвЂќ-contribute to вЂњworlding,вЂќ or the creation of the world through both creative and вЂњrationalвЂќ processes of community consensus. My methodology incorporates approaches from anthropology and affect theory, which seek to draw out naturalized social patterns that have faded into the invisible background of everyday life. By tracing an emerging sonic vocabulary through various genres and media products, my dissertation illustrates how sound worlds inscribed the political fantasies of an unstable society craving the presumed stability of knowledge. Amidst technological acceleration, social revolutions, and science fiction lore from Roswell to Area 51, media sounds and stories came to embody an inability to reconcile the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, the present and the future. I look at objects that seem imbued with the shifting spatial-temporalities of a nation whose self-ascribed spiritual calling to protect and revere nature met the rapid capitalist-technological innovations of the Space Age. Agitated by seismic social and political shifts, the years between 19 provide fertile ground for investigating slippages between environment, aesthetics, and social practice. вЂњWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.This dissertation investigates the relationship between American mass-media soundscapes and everyday experiences of scientific meaning and truth-value during the Space Race. * This song contains audio of KennedyвЂ™s Space Race speech Septemspeaking at Rice University вЂ“ text, audio and video links are at:

Those few minutes, when the command module re-entered the atmosphere and the radios fell silent, were the most anxious moments this newsreader has ever experiencedвЂ¦ There was always the danger that the command module might hit our atmosphere at the wrong angle, burn up and disintegrate. Our hearts were in our mouths, the world stood still waiting, anxiously waiting, to see if the вЂmen from the moonвЂ™ were going to make it home safely. Welcome to the bulletin and the news of an Apollo 11 homecoming. Song 3: The Children of the World (July 1969) We have followed this journey every step of the way and I can now tell you that man is on the moon! The Eagle has landed! I am happy to be reporting to you on this day a day of great human achievement. Announcing a significant increase in funding for space exploration the president made it clear that the decade ahead would prove to be one of the most challenging and exciting in the history of mankind. In a rousing speech today at Rice University President John F Kennedy outlined a plan to put a man on the moon. Gagarin successfully completed a 108-minute orbital flight in in his spacecraft, Vostok 1. In breaking news, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has become the first human to orbit the earth. Good evening, welcome to the bulletin on this day April 12, 1961. This script is optional for performances, but helps provide the audience with an historical context for each song.

Space age songs