Rate My Professor Seth Mulliken

Mulliken has taught at Northeastern University for 11 years. He investigates the intersection of sound, media, and race, focusing on cultural practices of sound—encompassing what people do, say, think, and act with sound—and their engagement with media technologies, which often reinforce the “ambience of white supremacy.” His current project analyzes a series of videos from the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection, attending to the overlap between sound practices, technologies, and resonances of whiteness in the insurrectionists’ actions and chants. In teaching, he offers courses like Sound Cultures (MSCR 2450), introduced in Fall 2024, where students critically analyze sound in media including music, environmental noises such as train horns and sirens, film and TV clips, and technologies like headphones and baby monitors. The course covers technical vocabulary like mobile heterotopia and acousmatic sound, amplification and recording technologies, cultural meanings, power dynamics, and racial implications, such as how loud car stereo regulations disproportionately target Black and brown communities. Students engage in sound engineering assignments and Boston campus sound walks. Mulliken stresses the need for a critical language to approach sound in media, which receives less attention than visual elements, and consistently questions how media privileges certain ways of thinking or hearing. He has contributed insights to university news on topics like Netflix season delays, highlighting the narrative complexities of streaming television.