Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Will Johnson is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Music. Themes from his work include Black digital memory, phantom archives and the latent poetics of audio engineer speak. His proposed dissertation project centers on composition for trunk subwoofers and conceives of automobile collectives as orchestras-in-motion. Throughout his work, particular attention is paid to subfrequencies and the left-most regions of the frequency spectrum. Here, “bass” is explored as a vibrotactile substance that challenges the formality of “music” as a purely auditory phenomena. Johnson is a visiting researcher at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Johannesburg’s Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) Research Centre. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation’s Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship and the McKnight Fellowship for Musicians.