Introduction : (re)percussions -- The end of senseless beating -- Knocking the subject -- Different strokes for different folks -- Sound of the city : a musician is being beaten -- A drum of one's own.

This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond (...) hearing and listening we 'audit' sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of 'sound studies.' To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound--including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence--to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialog, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds : The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In addition to this, I also have to move lodgings. The noise of the children has made the house in which I have been staying, quite useless for work. I will be exchanging this house for another one that is inhabited by a man with mental illness.Perhaps because in my research I have combed, perhaps over-combed, the matter of the emergence of sound studies as a field scholarly consideration of the topic “Sound and its Aftermath” seemed to solicit, even call (...) for, my participation. As noted in the texts just cited, I have wondered about both the disciplinary logic of emergence—when and where something like a new disciplinary object has arrived—but... (shrink)