Student Work
Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez — Selected Teaching Outcomes
The following is a selection of student projects from courses I have designed and taught at Brown University, including advanced seminars, production courses, and interdisciplinary ensembles. These projects reflect a range of media, technical approaches, and critical frameworks.
Program for the culminating concert of Genealogies of Noise, a seminar I designed and taught at Brown University. The course takes up a theoretical and experimental approach to noise, as participants develop noise methodologies as modes of response across sound, installation, performance, and writing.
Organ Failure documents an attempt to build a thermoacoustic organ from found and reused materials—using extreme temperatures to drive a pressure gradient and generate sound waves in recycled glass tubes. The organ did not sing as expected.
Construction documentation and design calculations, 2025.
Nonlocales is a recording project that treats the physical and imagined space in which noise is created as equal to traditional musical elements, calling into question what is signal and what is noise. The piece begins with a recording of a concrete stairwell with minimal foot traffic, contrasted against a static drum loop recorded in the same space. The stairwell recording is manipulated in pitch and equalization to focus the sounds without losing the fundamental characteristics of the space—both the physical room and the equipment used to capture it.
Book object. Noisy poetics.
A live rescoring of a classic film. Adelaide developed a custom approach to synchronizing live and fixed-media audio with archival moving image, producing a sonic reinterpretation of cinematic gesture.
Drawing on Maryanne Amacher's writings on perceptual geography and musical interplay, this group improvisation used the acoustic properties of Brown's Alumnae Hall Crystal Room as a compositional parameter. Performers responded to the sonic shape of the space itself, treating the room's resonance, the sonic qualities of spoken text, and the clarinet as interconnected forces informing the exchange between rigidity and flow.
Pling is old time music. Pling is a digital bow. Pling is an act of jealous love. Pling goes on and on and on and on. Pling stays right here.
An original work exploring the translation of datasets into sonic material. Using custom mapping strategies, the project investigates how numerical information can be rendered audible, foregrounding the interpretive decisions embedded in any act of sonification.
Abstract Machines is an interactive audiovisual installation, part of John's honors thesis in Music. The project confronts an unease with the aesthetic deception inherent to interactive installation art, which he argues is often complicit in an ideology of "weightlessness"—the perfect non-material efficiency of digital systems.
Installation documentation, Brown University, 2025.
Single from full album, written and produced to fulfill capstone project.