Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Introduction)

Current Musicology, 2017

SHOT: A person sits on a couch, book in hand, coffee table at the knees. We have not yet seen their head-the camera has kept their identity concealed, showing only the shoulders down. As the camera slowly pans, and the person carefully turns the page in their book, we hear voices being broadcast from a television. The camera switches gaze, turning to show a sports commentator speaking on screen "I think there's zero threat. My problem is, KG's a little too 'over-the-hill'... "

Open Philosophy

Increasingly privatized auditory spaces resulting from the mutual engendering of auditory cultural practices and sound technologies that separated the sense of hearing and segmented acoustic spaces have had a muting effect on our experience of Others that has intensified since the advent of mobile listening devices. In Section 1 of the article, I outline features of the social realm of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries that made modern sound technologies possible and then features of the technological realm that have shaped today’s social realm – all with an eye toward our experience of other people. Then, in Section 2, I reach for a few phenomenological tools from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don Ihde to draw out the phenomenological vectors that have taken shape within the enmeshed sociotechnological context described in Section 1. Specifically, I show how technologically mediated auditory experience has been individualized and how the use of sound techn...

Noise was probably the first environmental pollutant (apart from human waste) in the Ancient world. Yet today, by comparison with other environmental matters, noise and protection from its effects are often overlooked, except in specialist fields such as architecture or planning. One major reason for this may be that noise does not possess the same ability to spread that is characteristic of other forms of pollution. Noise is also an unusual form of environmental pollution in having a physical impact – it is 'heard' and can be 'felt' – but is predominantly interpreted subjectively. The impact and consequences of anthropogenic noise for humans and biodiversity in general are currently under-investigated in criminology and are under-addressed in both public and private international environmental law. Here we question why noise has not (so far) been explored within green criminology and only tentatively explored within cultural criminology. The objectives are to provide an overview of noise as a topic, connecting media, culture and anti-and pro-social behaviour, and to unearth interconnections between the matter of noise and its implications for the environment.

This text does not advocate noise as a political expression – although I would have absolutely no objection to that – but aims to contribute to the emergence of listening policies by analysing specific concepts and their relationship with the ideologies that generated them. It proposes a way of thinking about silence and noise in connection with space and the powers that govern these relationships.

Intersections | Cross-Sections, 2019

Of all of the cultural forms of expression, music is perhaps not only the most subversive in its articulations, but also the most far-reaching and penetrative in its act of execution. Though expressed in a complex matrix of formations, this phenomenon has been entangled both historically and presently in all cultures, making it an attribute of universal human communication. While few would be bold enough to deny such claims, what is perhaps more aligned to conjecture is the actual definition of music. While certain formations of sound are deemed music, others are derided as noise, frequently through localized structures of political authority. This paper will examine the cultural phenomenon and tension of noise vis-à-vis music in its perceived social constructions. Through such an exploration, this paper will demonstrate the capacity of noise to emerge from music as a form of resistance against prevailing dominant hegemonic codes of culture; notably through its ability to be enacted as a tool of socio-political agency to escape the rigid constructions of hetero/cisnormativity in our modern cultural landscapes. Through engaging the controversial communication medium of noise, emerging possibilities of dialogue will be illuminated from theorists and artists currently utilizing bold measures of sound to challenge far-right political ideologies in our contemporary era of Brexit and Trump. By examining such sonic articulations through the lenses of queer theory, aesthetics, and critical disability studies, this paper ultimately will highlight new possibilities for progressive change in a current state of reality dominated by increasingly subversive power structures.

Dancecult, 2011

University of California Press, 2020

Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, 2022

Can sound be a platform for activism? Beyond the possibilities of articulating cultural discourses of representation, can sound intervene to trigger changes in the status quo of those withstanding the pressures of marginality? ese questions lie at the core of this themed issue of Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, shedding light on the political potential of sound and aurality to contest the asymmetrical e ects of power. In the last decade, scholars have alerted us to how the neoliberal movement of capital not only de-(and re-)territorialized identity discourses through the global circulation of practices, symbols, meanings, and people; this ux also underscored the importance of aural messages in the production of cultural capital in globalization. is "intensi cation of the aural," it has been argued, points to the increased importance of sound and aurality to frame the experience of modernity. In our current global cultural moment, such intensi cation has made graphic print and silent reading just one instance of the process of signi cation. Yet, as with any text, aural records are sensitive to power imbalances that permeate the social relationships in which writer, reader, and text move. In this regard, Karen Dubinsky and Freddy Monasterio remind us that cultural texts can remain framed in the signifying logics of exoticized di erence. In their piece about Cuban music without Cubans, the authors warn about how cultural exoticism can pin identitarian discourse in a politics of di erence, where identity emerges only in relation to commodity value, moving in a symbolic economy of desire. In contrast, Olivia E. Holloway broaches aurality as a performative strategy to redress cultural symbols and the narratives they articulate. In her piece about women and feminist activism in capoeira, the author reads cultural practice not as a peripheral representational discourse. For female capoeira practitioners, music and sound enable performative spaces to intervene traditional male capoeira narratives. Performance rewrites capoeira as a cultural text and reframes gender in response to women's intervention. us, aurality and performance revalorize capoeira's discursive potential.