Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound's elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in the forefront of contemporary sonic discussions but also underscore auditory experience as fundamental to sound as a critical enterprise. In so doing, they offer exciting considerations of sound within and beyond its role in meaning, communication, and information and an illuminatingly original theoretical overview of the field of sound studies itself. Contributors. Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, John Dack, Veit Erlmann, Brian Kane, Jairo Moreno, John Mowitt, Pooja Rangan, Gavin Steingo, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne, David Toop
James A. Steintrager is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.
Acknowledgments vii Sound Objects: An Introduction / James A. Steintrager, with Rey Chow 1 I. Genealogies 1. Reflections on the Sound Object and Reduced Listening / Michel Chion 23 2. Pierre Schaeffer and the (Recorded) Sound Source / John Dack 33 3. The Fluctuating Sound Object / Brian Kane 53 II. Aural Reification, Sonic Commodification 4. Listening with Adorno, Again: Nonobjective Objectivity and the Possibility of Critique / James A. Steintrager 73 5. Spectral Objects: On the Fetish Character of Music Technologies / Jonathan Sterne 94 III. Acousmatic Complications 6. Listening after "Acousmaticity": Notes on a Transdisciplinary Problematic / Rey Chow 113 7. The Skin of the Voice: Acousmatic Illusions, Ventriloquial Listening / Pooja Rangan 130 IV. Sound Abjects and Nonhuman Relations 8. The Acoustic Abject: Sound and the Legal Imagination / Veit Erlmann 151 9. The Alluring Objecthood of the Heartbeat / Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo 167 10. On Nonhuman Sound-Sound as Relation / Georgina Born 185 V. Memory Traces 11. The Sound of Arche-Cinema / John Mowitt 211 12. Listening to the Sirens / Michael Bull 228 13. Entities Inertias Faint Beings: Drawing as Sounding / David Toop 246 Bibliography 265 Contributors 281 Index 285
"The carefully curated sequence of essays and chapters makes a significant contribution to the field of sound studies." - Aurelio Cianciotta (Neural) "Like the field of sound studies, the essays collected here are disciplinarily difficult to define or contain.... The text may well contribute to the creation of an audience through the challenges it presents. This volume moves the discussion of sound forward by recognizing its aesthetic and ideological richness as well as its ontological instability. As a whole, Sound Objects demonstrates the potential for engagement with sound to reverberate more deeply across artistic, aesthetic, and scholarly landscapes, as well as the promise of richness that comes from examining our basic assumptions." - Maribeth Clark (Notes) "Sound Objects provides readers with a deepened exploration of the sonic field while maintaining cross-disciplinary conversations to help sound studies further congeal as an integrated field. . . . The collection will also resonate with a wide readership through the range of represented experiences of sound with which readers will identify." - Kate Galloway (MUSICultures)
