Katharina Schmidt

en

Katharina Schmidt is a musician and musicologist based in Berlin. She has been trained as a drummer and pianist and holds a Master's degree in Sound Studies from the Berlin University of the Arts. During her Bachelor’s degree in musicology, theatre studies and comparative literature at the Free University in Berlin, she held a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Her artistic portfolio includes film music, sound art, and radiophonic pieces. She has published academic research papers on topics such as sound in literature (particularly in the novels of Virginia Woolf), acoustic ecology, and new interfaces for musical expression. Katharina works as a curator with Cashmere Radio, Sonic Field, and SVS Radio, and continues to write and perform her own music, which has been played at festivals such as Radiophrenia Glasgow and Borealis Festival. For more information, you are welcome at www.katharina-schmidt.net

research

research expositions

  • Echoes of Subjectivity: A Literary Acoustemology of the Home (2021) author(s): Katharina Schmidt published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This paper works towards an acoustemology of the home by investigating the home’s depiction in a literary text, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. This interdisciplinary approach is chosen to explore the potential of tapping into sonic epistemologies encapsulated in literature. Borrowing Brandon LaBelle’s concept of acoustic territories, relationships between notions of home and the auditory are traced in the novel, leading to an analysis that develops the sonic figure of the echo as a micro-epistemology. In a close reading of selected scenes, the aesthetic and philosophical implications are examined and, drawing on Levinas, Irigaray, Nancy, and Deleuze, this text traces how the figure of the echo ultimately provides the structure of the subject as it is constituted in the ethical encounter, in the resonance with an Other. In turn, this analysis reflects on how the conditions of the “feminine” sphere of the home inform conceptualizations of ethics, politics, and philosophy.
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