Sounds The Ambient Humanities [Paperback]

This is not a bookaboutsound. It is a studyofsounds 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 soundincluding a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silenceto show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making.Sounds: The Ambient Humanitiessignificantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.

John Mowittholds the Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds. He is the author of several books, includingRadio: Essays in Bad Reception,Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, andRe-takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages.

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: SQUAWKING
1. ECHO
2. WHISTLE
3. WHISPER
4. GASP
5. SILENCE
6. TERCER SONIDO

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Soundsis a call to criticism, an invocation that compels us or enables us to take a very different approach not so much to sound studies but rather to the work of criticism itself. The work consists of amplifying sonic aspects of the texts under consideration, aspects which barely exist yet are inescapably present, such that they might allow lc*