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

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

 

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.