Raphael Börger

Raphael Börger, born 1994, joined the Chair of Musicology at the University of Potsdam in 2022 as a research assistant (link to the institute’s website). Previously he studied musicology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (BA; MA) and at La Sapenzia (Rome), specialising in the theory and history of popular music, systematic musicology, transcultural musicology and historical anthropology of music. His master’s thesis focuses on the intersections of the history of listening and sound, anthropology and the history of science, on listening to noise in the context of physical-acoustic industrial research around 1920 and in the field of a recent listening practice that mobilises noise as a sleeping aid. He is currently working on a dissertation on environmental listening practices.

Member of the ‘Gesellschaft für Musikforschung’ (GfM) here in the working group Music and Media as well as in the ‘International Association for the Study of Popular Music’ (IASPM & IASPM D-A-CH), there in the board as National Representative (since November 2024).

From 2017-2022 dramaturgical, programme design and production activities for the festival ‘Pop-Kultur’ of the senate-owned funding institution for pop music in Berlin, Musicboard Berlin GmbH.

Current publication: Börger, Raphael (2024): Klima schreiben und hören. Überlegungen zu einer anthropozänen Ästhetik. In: S. Beimdieke und J. Caskel (Eds.): Musik und Klimawandel. Künstlerisches Handeln in Krisenzeiten. Bielefeld: transcript.

Methodological-theoretical approaches:

• Anthropology of music
• Ecomusicology
• Music and mediation: actor-network theories, Kulturtechnikforschung, media archaeology

Main research areas:

• Listening research: historical and systematic approaches
• History of sound and knowledge: music and sound as knowledge machines
• Music in the Anthropocene
• Automated music production