Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise [Paperback]

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age.

As his book unfolds, Kennedy shows readers the intricate political, societal, and cultural connections between the constructs of time, space, and sound& This thought-provoking, brilliantly written book will resonate for generations to come. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. CHOICE

For Kennedy, the algorithmic digital economy of our times is manufacturing a torrential complexity that necessitates a radical departure in our modes of critical thinking, a turn that seeks not simply to elevate the sonic to the status of the visual but, rather, to deploy a pansonic mode of engagement. The political project here is clear: we need to attend to this complexity rather than abdicate responsibility of its meanings to automated algorithmic selection, perceptual coding, cloaking technologies and noise filtering processes. We need not only to bring the noise but to turn it up. Think of this not as an analysis but rather a clarion call from the future anterior of music that demands that we listen in the full knowledge that we may well not yet know what to do in the face of the noise that we hear. Greg Hainge, lcó