Towards Acoustic Justice

The essay poses acoustics as a critical and creative framework, one that gives entry onto the issues of cultural situatedness and social recognition. In particular, acoustics is underscored not only as a property of architectural space, or as a knowledge within the field of physics, but equally as a social and political question. In what ways do acoustic norms shape the experiences and capacities of listening and attunement within certain environments? Acoustics is highlighted as a performative arena, giving way to specific understandings of relationality and struggles over recognition. This leads to investigating how acoustics functions as the basis for a range of practices that, following Sara Ahmed, undertake the work of social, cultural, and bodily reorientation. Acoustic practices of rhythm and echo, noise and vibration, for example, are highlighted as operative within social movement action as well as informal daily encounters. This critical view allows for articulating an acoustic justice model, capturing sound and listening as important capacities and paths for working at social equality

Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance

In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistance be auditory? Sonic Agency highlights sound’s invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities, and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In this timely and important book, author Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound’s functions into four figures of resistance – the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant and the weak – and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the margins toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. When the current climate has left many feeling they have lost their voice, it may be sound itself which restores it to them

Wasting Breath in Hamlet

This is the final version. Available on open access from Palgrave via the DOI in this recordThis chapter draws on instances of disordered breathing in Hamlet in order to examine the cultural signifcance of sighs in the early modern period, as well as in the context of current work in the feld of medical humanities. Tracing the medical history of sighing in ancient and early modern treatises of the passions, the chapter argues that sighs, in the text and the performance of the tragedy, exceed their conventional interpretation as symptoms of pain and disrupt meaning on the page and on stage. In the light of New Materialist theory, the air circulating in Hamlet is shown to dismantle narratives of representation, posing new questions for the future of medical humanities

Acoustic Spatiality

Experiences of listening can be appreciated as intensely relational, bringing us into contact with surrounding events, bodies and things. Given that sound propagates and expands outwardly, as a set of oscillations from a particular source, listening carries with it a sensual intensity, whereby auditory phenomena deliver intrusive and disruptive as well as soothing and assuring experiences. The physicality characteristic of sound suggests a deeply impressionistic, locational "knowledge structure" – that is, the ways in which listening affords processes of exchange, of being in the world, and from which we extend ourselves. Sound, as physical energy reflecting and absorbing into the materiality around us, and even one's self, provides a rich platform for understanding place and emplacement. Sound is always already a trace of location.Such features of auditory experience give suggestion for what I may call an acoustical paradigm – how sound sets in motion not only the material world but also the flows of the imagination, lending to forces of signification and social structure, and figuring us in relation to each other. The relationality of sound brings us into a steady web of interferences, each of which announces the promise or problematic of being somewhere

Background noise : sound art and the resonance of place

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Sonic Agency : Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance

"In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistance be auditory? Sonic Agency highlights sound’s invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities, and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In this timely and important book, author Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound’s functions into four figures of resistance – the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant and the weak – and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the margins toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. When the current climate has left many feeling they have lost their voice, it may be sound itself which restores it to them." -- Publisher's website