about
the Continuing Education Project
a community in New York building new ways of listening to music, learning about it, and gathering around it.
it began in September 2025 as Continuing Education — listening parties where a room of people sits with one album at a time. Since then it has grown into a listening room, a map of music history, a workshop building the speakers themselves, and a group of people who care about the same thing: getting closer to the music, together.
the projects look different from one another. They share one idea — that music has been a communal thing for almost all of human history, and that we are the first people able to hear it entirely alone. We want to return home to pure sound.
the Experiments
each of the following Experiments that the Project is undertaking is an endeavor towards the same Vision. They are unified by philosophy, not by form.
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“Continuing Education”
candlelit, private vinyl listening parties, held privately for friends and newcomers. Numbered as volumes, they’ve occurred about once a month since September 2025. Each party centers on a single album, the deep-focus record. Before dropping the needle, Sha sets the record in its world, tracing the history behind it and his reasons for choosing it, so that the room has something to hold on to during the listen. Then, we blow out the candles, the record plays to everyone’s undivided attention, and conversation carries the rest of the night.
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The Clearing
a public deep-listening series at various pop-up locations around the city. It is currently held at Fugue Gallery, on the fourth floor of 132 Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Music guides and performers present, share, and teach music through a 6.1 spatial audio system designed and hand-built by otissstudio. The programs are carefully sequenced, tea is served, and there are occasional breaks for talks, workshops, or meditations.
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otissstudio
custom speaker systems and other novel sound objects, designed and hand-built by Otis Gordon. The 6.1 spatial audio system at Fugue Gallery that powers The Clearing is one of them. They are the Project’s philosophy made physical: objects built for the ritual of listening, to bring people closer to the music.
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rhapsode
an educational platform built to restore context to our music consumption by creating new ways of visualizing music history. Records used to come with liner notes; rhapsode is what they would be now, reference-grade and built with today’s tools. At its center is a living, taxonomical map of popular music: interconnected notes on its records, people, genres, scenes, theory and critical scholarship. These notes intersect with a literal map of New York’s scenes, rooms and neighborhoods, with a time slider showing when each was alive. Meant to be wandered, rhapsode lets you start from a record you love and follow its lines of influence and inheritance outward until its story joins all the others.
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the Guidebook
a guide to the best places for hearing recorded music around New York. It covers the city’s listening rooms: their sound systems, their hours, the people who run them, and the history behind them. In tandem with rhapsode, it sets each room beside the rooms of the city’s musical past, so the living city can stand beside the remembered one. rhapsode tells you where the music came from; the Guidebook tells you where it can be heard tonight.
coming soon
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the newsletter
a monthly note on what the Project has coming, and the other listening and learning events around the city, sent to everyone on the mailing list.
coming soon · join the mailing list
the people
- the Faculty lead the Continuing Education Project toward its Mission and Vision.
- Visiting Faculty have contributed to a session of The Clearing.
- the Community is comprised of everyone who has attended an event hosted by the Project, and everyone on the mailing list.
the Departments
the Departments organize what a Faculty member contributes to the Project.
selection · history · context · research · voice · conversation
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curation
what gets played. Choosing the music, sequencing it, and guiding the room through it, as well as collaborating with artists and outside sound selectors.
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writing
how we express the philosophy behind the Project, in pieces meant to be read for their own sake: the Manifesto, articles and essays, recaps, and the program notes that become each session’s record in the archive. The Writing Department also edits what the other Departments draft, so the Project speaks in one voice.
experimentation · invention · installation · sensation · atmosphere · ritual
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sound
the speaker systems, any physical objects built around them, and anything else that contributes to the way we experience sound.
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space
the spatial and experiential design of rooms where we hold events, from the entryway onwards. How you arrive, who greets you, any other things that get served, and how the room feels throughout an event.
image · print · engineering · storytelling · correspondence · community
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design
the look and branding. Posters, photographs, film, the logo, and anything else printed or pictured in the Project’s name. Each piece should stand on its own and add up to one world with the rest: cohesive and recognizable, somewhat educational and editorial, simple and clean, never anonymous.
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computing
the design and engineering of bringrecords.com, rhapsode.art, and the digital record of every event. We want to find ways to make websites that are focused, quietly delightful, and reverent of your attention, so the Project feels like one world online as well as in every room it touches.
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communications
outreach to the public. How people hear that an event is happening, and everything that brings them in: announcements, posts, press, and the newsletter.
get involved
if you’d like to contribute to the Project, tell us a little about yourself and we’ll be in touch.
Sha Frasierfounder and Director
Otis Gordonfounder and Director