Sound Objects

James A. Steintrager is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine.Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.

• Acknowledgments  viiSound Objects: An Introduction / James A. Steintrager, with Rey Chow  1I. Genealogies1. Reflections on the Sound Object and Reduced Listening / Michel Chion  232. Pierre Schaeffer and the (Recorded) Sound Source / John Dack  333. The Fluctuating Sound Object / Brian Kane  53II. Aural Reification, Sonic Commodification4. Listening with Adorno, Again: Nonobjective Objectivity and the Possibility of Critique / James A. Steintrager  735. Spectral Objects: On the Fetish Character of Music Technologies / Jonathan Sterne  94III. Acousmatic Complications6. Listening after "Acousmaticity": Notes on a Transdisciplinary Problematic / Rey Chow  1137. The Skin of the Voice: Acousmatic Illusions, Ventriloquial Listening / Pooja Rangan  130IV. Sound Abjects and Nonhuman Relations8. The Acoustic Abject: Sound and the Legal Imagination / Veit Erlmann  1519. The Alluring Objecthood of the Heartbeat / Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo  16710. On Nonhuman Sound-Sound as Relation / Georgina Born  185V. Memory Traces11. The Sound of Arche-Cinema / John Mowitt  21112. Listening to the Sirens / Michael Bull  22813. Entities Inertias Faint Beings: Drawing as Sounding / David Toop  246Bibliography  265Contributors  281Index  285

"The carefully curated sequence of essays and chapters makes a significant contribution to the field of sound studies." - Aurelio Cianciotta (Neural) "Like the field of sound studies, the essays collected here are disciplinarily difficult to define or contain.… The text may well contribute to the creation of an audience through the challenges it presents. This volume moves the discussion of sound forward by recognizing its aesthetic and ideological richness as well as its ontological instability. As a whole, Sound Objects demonstrates the potential for engagement with sound to reverberate more deeply across artistic, aesthetic, and scholarly landscapes, as well as the promise of richness that comes from examining our basic assumptions." - Maribeth Clark (Notes) "Sound Objects provides readers with a deepened exploration of the sonic field while maintaining cross-disciplinary conversations to help sound studies further congeal as an integrated field. . . . The collection will also resonate with a wide readership through the range of represented experiences of sound with which readers will identify." - Kate Galloway (MUSICultures)