Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World

by Judith Lochhead (Editor), Eduardo Mendieta (Editor), Stephen Decatur Smith (Editor)

Overview

There is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with sound—whether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us.

​Sound and Affect maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226758015
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/23/2021
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Judith Lochhead is professor of music history and theory at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis and coeditor of Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies.


Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy and affiliate professor in the School of International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University. He is the coeditor of The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon.


Stephen Decatur Smith is associate professor of music history and theory at Stony Brook University. His articles have appeared in Popular Music, the Journal of Music Theory, Contemporary Music Review, and Opera Quarterly.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur Smith
Part 1. Sounding the Political

Chapter 1. Waves of Moderation: The Sound of Sophrosyne in Ancient Greek and Neoliberal Times
Robin James
Chapter 2. The Politics of Silence: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
Adam Knowles
Part 2. Affect, Music, Human

Chapter 3. Sign, Affect, and Musicking before the Human
Gary Tomlinson
Chapter 4. Human Beginnings and Music: Technology and Embodiment Roles
Don Ihde
Chapter 5. The Life and Death of Daniel Barenboim
James Currie
Part 3. Voicings and Silencings

Chapter 6. The Philosopher’s Voice: The Prosody of Logos
Eduardo Mendieta
Chapter 7. Late Capitalism, Affect, and the Algorithmic Self in Music Streaming Platforms
Michael Birenbaum Quintero
Part 4. Affective Listenings

Chapter 8. Music, Labor, and Technologies of Desire
Martin Scherzinger
Chapter 9. Musical Affect, Autobiographical Memory, and Collective Individuation in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction
Christopher Haworth
Part 5. Temporalities of Sounding

Chapter 10. The “Sound” of Music: Sonic Agency and the Dialectic of Freedom and Constraint in Jazz Improvisation
Lorenzo C. Simpson
Chapter 11. Merleau-Ponty on Consciousness and Affect through the Temporal Movement of Music
Jessica Wiskus
Chapter 12. A. N. Whitehead, Feeling, and Music: On Some Potential Modifications to Affect Theory
Ryan Dohoney
Part 6. Theorizing the Affections

Chapter 13. Delivering Affect: Mersenne, Voice, and the Background of Jesuit Rhetorical Theory
André de Oliveira Redwood
Chapter 14. Mimesis and the Affective Ground of Baroque Representation
Daniel Villegas Vélez
Chapter 15. Affect and the Recording Devices of Seventeenth-Century Italy
Emily Wilbourne
Chapter 16. Immanuel Kant and the Downfall of the Affektenlehre
Tomás McAuley
Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Lochhead, Mendieta, and Smith have assembled a powerful compendium of theoretical and historical essays on sound and affect. This volume represents a synthesis of three rapidly growing areas of new research: affect theory, sound studies, and philosophically inflected music studies. Sound and Affect will make a significant and lasting impact in many fields. It is the type of publication that will challenge current assumptions about method and stimulate the growth of new forms of inquiry.

Wesleyan University Roger Mathew Grant

‘Soundscape’ has become a common term, but most actual soundscapes remain unheard with any degree of specificity. This affecting collection helps remedy that state. It offers multiple entry points into what it regards as ‘sonic affective regimes,’ vibratory fields that impact broad swaths of eco-social life. Sound and Affect covers an astonishing range of topics, figures, and periods. One finds Plato and Ludacris, Proust and Phil Collins, Monk, Deleuze, and the Jesuit Marin Mersenne, and topics swing from desire to labor to the accented voice. Multidisciplinary in the richest sense, the book is a boon for sound studies, the philosophy of music, and musicology, and a primer for those who want to listen better and think more trenchantly about what they hear.

Emory University John Lysaker