Most mornings, Gabrielle Cornish listens to the latest from trending artists — like Charli XCX and Chappell Roan — during her commutes to campus. With her AirPods in, she waits to hear the beep of the crosswalk to alert her it’s safe to walk and listens for the click of her key unlocking her office door. At night, Cornish listens to the echoes of crickets and the tap of her footsteps as she walks home. After spending time in Chelyabinsk, a Russian City near Siberia, the variation in sounds she experienced ignited her interest in the larger implications of the sonic world, specifically how it reflects identity.
“As a musician and as a music historian, I’d been attuned to music, and I understood the importance of music in our everyday lives, whether it’s Mozart or Chappell Roan,” says Cornish, an assistant professor of musicology with the Mead Witter School of Music. “But it was the first time I thought about how sound, more broadly and abstractly, has this ability to both place and displace us within the world in significant ways.”
During Cornish’s undergraduate years, she double majored in music and Russian studies, spending several months fully immersed in the Russian language and culture. Chelyabinsk, where Cornish spent a year after completing her undergraduate studies, was far from any major cities, forcing her to move past the language barrier.
When she returned to the United States after her year abroad, Cornish noted the drastic sonic differences between home and Russia. Specifically, she found it interesting how everyday sounds heard in America (e.g. crickets) were not present in Russia. She went on to study sound during the Cold War, combining her passion for music and Russian studies to examine the experience of individuals during this period.
Musicology — the study of music as an academic discipline rather than as performance and composition — allowed Cornish to combine both interests as she pursued her Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music in New York.
Cornish’s research looks at music, sound and technology in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Specifically, she looks at how so-called “ordinary” citizens — individuals not in the elite political class —experienced all types of sound in the Soviet Union.
“When I say sound and sound studies, that can be music, but it can also be midday traffic, elevators in your apartment building and noisy neighbors,” Cornish says.
Rather than study what political elites would’ve listened to in Soviet Russia, Cornish studies the everyday sounds experienced by someone, for example, living in an apartment building or going to work in a factory.
“(Dmitri) Shostakovich and (Sergei) Rachmaninoff were the sound of a certain demographic in the Soviet Union during the time, but it wasn’t the music most people were listening to,” Cornish says.
Despite the constant censorship issue in Soviet Russia, Cornish tried to keep an open mind in her research. That’s why she’s focused her research on everyday people instead of government officials. She looked to the lives of still-free dissidents living under the authoritarian regime.
“I was struck by how most music history around the Soviet Union missed these groups of people who weren’t necessarily in the elite, high-art world but were still interacting with sound and music in their everyday lives,” Cornish says.
Dissidents in the Soviet Union often met in kitchens to listen and study music censored by the government, such as Western music and Soviet bands critical of the state — bands like Akvarium and Kino. Cornish wanted to study Cold War sound from that angle, rather than researching the elites.
While most of Cornish’s research is based on recorded audio sources and oral history interviews, she has also used sources from unexpected archival collections to understand the sonic environment during the Cold War. For example, Cornish has looked through missives on noise abatement and danger of loud noise from the Russian Ministry of Health.
“Having the state be so centralized, I could see what people in Kyrgyzstan were writing and saying to these central agencies like the Ministry of Health or Melodiya,” Cornish says. “So, it just expanded my understanding of that multiplicity of experience in the Soviet Union.”
There are so many ways people can experience sound, Cornish says. In her classes, she may have musicology students taking the class for the major, but she also teaches neurobiology and engineering students who may not know how to read sheet music. The variety of perspectives in her classes has taught her how other people interpret and understand sonic environments.
“I can write something about music in the Space Race era and folks from history or astronomy can read it, because they’re interested in the space race,” Cornish says. “It has given me an opportunity to not just learn new topics, but to learn new approaches and new ways of thinking through source material.”
When Russia opened its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Cornish recalls hearing clips of Ukrainian musicians playing the Ukrainian national anthems and protesters marching through major Russian cities before getting arrested. These different sounds reiterated to Cornish the importance of sound and music in politics.
This is true in everything from the sounds of those Ukrainian anthems to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s carefully curated summer playlist featuring popular songs like Charli XCX’s “365” to appeal to a young demographic.
“Sound and music are incredibly effective political acts,” Cornish says. “In general, making music is a very political act.”