Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter

by Michael C. Heller

Overview

Just Beyond Listening asks how we might think about encounters with sound that complicate standard accounts of aurality. In a series of essays, Michael C. Heller considers how sound functions in dialogue with a range of sensory and affective modalities, including physical co-presence, textual interference, and spectral haunting. The text investigates sound that is experienced in other parts of the body, altered by cross-wirings of the senses, weaponized by the military, or mediated and changed by cultural practices and memory. Building on recent scholarship in sound studies and affect theory, Heller questions not only how sound propagates acoustically but how sonic presences temper our total experience of the world around us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520350786
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Series:	California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media , #5
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michael C. Heller is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s and founding editor of the journal Jazz and Culture.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 

Introduction 

PART I: LOUDNESS AND SILENCE 
1. Between Silence and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter 
2. Let’s Listen to Nothing: Silence and the Anechoic Chamber 
3. Silencing and Alternative Silences 

PART II: TEXTUAL INTERFERENCE 
4. Projecting Results: Opera Supertitles and the People Who Hated Them 
5. Diaries and Postcards: Archival Privilege, Empathy, and Intimacy 

PART III: DEATH AND DEADNESS 
6. Deploying Deadness in Louis Armstrong’s House 
7. Tape Death: Mourning Sounds We Never Heard 

Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index