New Books in Sound Studies
105 episodes - English - Latest episode: 12 days ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with scholars of sound about their new books.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Breathing Together
July 08, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesWorking across and among languages, media, and art forms, Caroline Bergvall’s writing takes form as published poetic works and performance, frequently of sound-driven projects. Her interests include multilingual poetics, queer feminist politics and issues of cultural belonging, commissioned and shown by such institutions as MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp, and won numerous awards. Ragadawn is a multimedia performance that explores ideas of multi-lingualis...
Animal Control
July 01, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesThis week, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction monograph that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. We’ll hear works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb, interwoven with Wong’s unflinchingly reflective prose. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-...
A Drummer's Tale
June 24, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesCharles Hayward is one of the most propulsive, resourceful and generative rock-plus drummers of the past half-century. An influential percussionist, keyboardist, songwriter, singer of songs, and forward thinker through sound, Charles spoke with Phantom Power about a 40thanniversary touring with a partly reformed and enlarged This Heat as This Is Not This Heat, and then opened into generous reflections on his solo works The Bell Agency and 30 Minute Snare Drum Roll. Charles is founding membe...
Test Subjects
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesSeason Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies. In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while ...
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, "Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media: History, Practices and Production" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBudhaditya Chattopadhyay’s book Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media: History, Practices and Production (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is an exhaustive attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent through artistic research. It aims to fill a significant scholarly void by addressing issues of sound and listening within the cultural contexts of the Global South. By developing a comprehensive understanding of the unique soundscapes of Indian film and audiovisual media, his study examines t...
Screwed and Chopped
June 10, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesSince the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods. Folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins studies slab culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativ...
Corey J. Miles, "Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South" (U Mississippi Press, 2024)
June 07, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University of Mississippi Press, 2023), Corey J. Miles narrates how southern Black sound, feeling, and being is constantly policed, surveilled, and criminalized. In doing so, he re-narrates the region as the "carceral South," to capture the ways people in the South and beyond can feel the emotional weight of the criminalization of Blackness. Where exactly does the South begin and end? Current maps are too rigid to account for...
Matthew D. Morrison, "Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States" (U California Press, 2024)
June 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBlacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an id...
Data Streams
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesOn July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news of World Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention. We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah Barclay, the editor of Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, about her Biosphere Soundscapes project and some of the challenges of developing accessible apps for mobile platforms. Cris grappl...
Ears Racing
May 27, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesThis episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African Am...
Dirty Rat
May 20, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesThis time we talk with a fascinating sound artist and composer Mack met at a recent meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. As his website puts it, “Brian House is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His background in both computer science and noise music informs his research-based practice. Recent interests include AI, telegraphy, and urban rats.” If that description looks a little daunting on the screen, the w...
City of Voices
May 13, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesThis episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (U of Minnesota Press: 2018). And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Ro...
Dead Air
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesOn our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible. We begin with author John Biguenet discussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the relationship between quietude, reading, writing, and the self. Next, we speak to poet and hurricane responder Rodrigo Toscano, who takes us into the forebodi...
Richard Beaudoin, "Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismissed as extraneous noises. In Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings (Oxford UP, 2024), author Richard Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry into non-notated sounds in recordings of classical music, recognizing often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music. Beaudoin classif...
Steve Ferzacca, "Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore" (NUS Press, 2021)
February 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life i...
Chen-Pang Yeang, "Transforming Noise. A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955" (2023)
January 30, 2024 05:00 - 56 minutesToday, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history she...
Carolyn Birdsall, "Radiophilia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesA century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmission and reception. The thrilling experience of tuning in to the live sounds of this new medium prompted strong affective responses in its listeners. This book introduces a new concept of "radiophilia," defined as the attachment to, or even a love of radio. Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures as...
Matthew F. Jordan, "Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesDanger Sound Klaxon!:The Horn That Changed History (University of Virginia Press, 2023) reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxon...
Pavitra Sundar, "Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
November 15, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesPavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic im...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesItalian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contribute...
David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, “Keywords in Sound” (Duke UP, 2015)
August 17, 2023 14:08 - 39 minutesFeaturing twenty entries on subjects such as music, voice, noise, shape and the body Keywords in Sound (Duke, 2015) pushes at the boundaries of ‘sound studies’ through its intellectual overviews and suggested openings on each of the key words. In this podcast we speak to the book’s editors David Novak... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)
June 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual c...
The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)
June 15, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesWay back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to ge...
Sebanti Chatterjee, "Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesSebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. ...
Mark Goodall, "Gathering of the Tribe: A Companion to Occult Music on Vinyl" (Headpress, 2022)
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIn his new series, Gathering of the Tribe (Headpress, 2022) Mark Goodall explores the mysterious power of sound and tone. Each book in the series is devoted to reviewing records that reveal divide and cosmic laws, voyages to other worlds, or use sound as a tool for transformation. Volume One: Acid explores the key explores the key aspects of the acid experience, these being principally the way in which psychedelic drugs intensify sensory impressions (sound and vision); the ability to experien...
Macs Smith, "Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City" (MIT Press, 2021)
April 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are founded on the pathologization of parasites, which can never be fully expelled. In Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021), Macs Smith extends Serres's approach to Paris as a mediatic city, asking what organisms, people, and forms o...
The Making of "Ways of Hearing"
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBonus to the Ways of Hearing podcast and book A behind-the-scenes conversation with the creators of Ways of Hearing, the podcast and book. Hosted by author Damon Krukowski, with Radiotopia and Showcase executive producer Julie Shapiro, sound designer Ian Coss, MIT Press editor Matthew Browne, and graphic designer James Goggin. Recorded live before a studio audience at the PRX Podcast Garage, April 9, 2019. Mixed by Ian Coss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo...
David Rothenberg, "Whale Music: Thousand Mile Songs in a Sea of Sound" (Terra Nova Press, 2023)
April 04, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesWhale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility of alien intelligence--not in outer space but right here on earth. Thoughtful, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining, Whale Music: Thousand Mile Songs in a Sea of Sound (Terra Nova Press, 2023) uses the enigma of whale sounds to open up whales' underwater world of sonic mystery. In observing and talking with leading researchers from around t...
The Sharing of Sound Art
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesIn this podcast, Claire MacDonald and Sarah Parry discuss the history of recording, the sharing of sound art between artists, how recording has shaped communities, the impact of technology on artists and their publics, and the artist's voice and the different genres it inhabits. About the Contributors: Claire MacDonald is a curator, writer, and editor whose work focuses on the intersections of performance, writing, and art. She is a founding editor of Performance Research and a contributing e...
Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 19 minutesMichael Gurevich, lecturer at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at the Queen’s University, Belfast School of Music and Sonic Arts, serves as guest editor of the Winter 2010 issue of Computer Music Journal. In this podcast, Michael discusses the fields of Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). He describes how these fields intersect and what they can learn from each other, touching on how the field of Computer Music has grown and how this affects performance and composition of elect...
Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAndrew Simon, a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College, discusses his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2022) , with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Media of the Masses is an engaging book that examines the impact of cassettes, cassette players, and their users during a particular period in Egypt's recent past. It provides a brilliant example of how disparate and surprising sources can be used t...
Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær, "The Sounds of Spectators at Football" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe sounds of spectators at football (soccer) are often highlighted – by spectators, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars, media producers, etc. – as crucial for the experience of football. These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the production (at the stadium) and conveyance (in televised broadcast) of 'atmosphere.' The Sounds of Spectators at Football (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær addresses why and how spectator sounds contribute to the ...
Nathan Vedal, "The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge" (Columbia UP, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, ...
Anthony Reed, "Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production" (Duke UP, 2020)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed...
Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions...
Irene Hilden, "Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies" (Leuven UP, 2022)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesDealing with the colonial archive entails acknowledging the inability to know everything, accounting for the archive’s limited and incomplete condition. Dealing with the colonial archive is not merely about stories of the past but also about the history of the present, and how it is interrupted by the past. — Irene Hilden, in conversation with New Books Network. With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive'...
Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 11, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesThe natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life. At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton UP, 2022)shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving i...
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
September 29, 2022 17:17 - 35 minutesRebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story, the seismic cultural impact on society in the 1980s, the worries of diminishing social... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/soun...
Echo
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Amit Pinchevski tells us about echoes. An echo is a sonic reflection of an emission bouncing back to its origin, which if delayed long enough sounds like a response. The echo of one's voice is constitutively not one's voice, and therefore gives an uncanny impression. Amit talks about the myths, metaphors, and materialities of echoes, the subject of his recent book. Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the H...
Eldritch Priest, "Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it ...
Kim Haines-Eitzen, "Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us" (Princeton UP, 2022)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesFor the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us (Princeton UP, 2022) shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how...
Mattin, "Social Dissonance" (MIT Press, 2022)
July 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWe are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorati...
Andrew Simon, "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMedia of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford UP, 2022) investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the cr...
Judith Lochhead et al., "Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesSound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (U Chicago Press, 2021) maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in u...
Resonance
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutesKim speaks with Julie Beth Napolin about Resonance. Julie Beth’s book The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) explores resonance and sound in modern literature. In the episode she references Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambala Publications, 1996), the music of Toru Takemitsu, and Damo Suzuki´s “sound carriers.” In our longer conversation she talked about Naomi Waltham-Smith’s new ...
David George Haskell, "Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction" (Viking, 2022)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWe live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly diverge...
Shara Rambarran, "Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourVirtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and list...
Mike Errico, "Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter" (Backbeat Book, 2022)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesToday I talked to Mike Errico about his new book Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter (Backbeat Books, 2022). Brain teasers invite you; brain embarrassers are songs you can’t get a handle on readily enough, causing listeners to give up. That is but one of the many fine distinctions Mike Errico makes in this engaging, whimsical-and-yet-serious book about the art of crafting songs. This episode spans a range from what constitutes a mission song (which lay out the ...
Robert W. Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew, "Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria" (Copernicus, 2020)
January 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIt is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involves an array of complaints including brain damage, the authors present compelling evidence that mas...