Peter McMurray
Department of Music, class of 2014
PhD Dissertation Title: Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin
Capstone Project: God Listens to Those Who Praise Him
Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist and composer working on a media-rich book and multichannel sound/video installation on the Islamic acoustics of Turkish Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Harvard, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. While at Harvard, his research engaged questions of urban sound and Islam, particularly within the context of transnational Turkish communities in Berlin and his CMP capstone project was a 16-channel audio piece, “God Listens to Those Who Praise Him” (2014), documenting some of the multifaceted sounds of Turkish Berlin. In recent years, he has been working on a series of short films about musical instrument builders in Turkey, Bosnia and Germany, as well as locally in Boston. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he is beginning a new project on the militarization of American sound technologies during World War II.
This information is accurate as of the student’s graduation year.