It has become clich & eacute; to decry the decay of reading in an age of distraction. Yet for every literary scholar who proclaims the destruction of attention, another points out that today's nostalgic version of attentive reading never really existed. How might we disentangle reading and attention to articulate forms of textual engagement befitting the noisiness of today's information environments? This essay pursues an expanded field of reading that involves not just deciphering writing, but navigating (and getting lost in) split attention and sensory distraction. I analyse musician Matthew Herbert's The Music (2018), a book composed entirely of descriptions of sounds. Through ostensibly silent invocations of sound, The Music prompts a phenomenology of reading that wavers between the sensory and figurative dimensions of listening. I argue that the "noise" of reading - its movement between signal and sense, meaning and indeterminacy, focus and distraction - calls for a textual aesthetics that drifts beyond linguistic representation into messy encounters between bodies, texts, and world. By examining the book's interpellation of readers, its defiance of recording and playback, and its emphasis on the bodies and breaths undergirding reading, I probe an atmospheric, inattentive style of reading wherein words are sparse nodes in an expansive process of mediation.
On 26 January 2023, American novelist Katie Kitamura went on the French radio show Par les temps qui courent to discuss her 2021 novel Intimacies, about an interpreter working for the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The show's broadcaster Marie Richeux asked Kitamura questions in French; Kitamura answered in English. Between them, fittingly, stood an interpreter, who translated Kitamura's answers back into French for listeners. Although both Kitamura's and the interpreter's voices can be heard layered on top of each other throughout the interview, after the first few words the volume on Kitamura's voice is turned down, while that on the interpreter's is turned up. The result is a paradoxical echo effect - common, of course, to interpretation scenes - whereby the original voice actually appears to come after the interpreter's. And yet, despite the preponderance of this voice, the interpreter is only acknowledged in passing at the beginning of the interview. This article explores the implications of this echo, or, as I propose we refer to it, "trans-latency", for both the theory and practice of translation, of which interpretation is an important if distinct and sometimes embattled subfield.
Today, Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 film Soy Cuba (& YAcy; - & Kcy;& ucy;& bcy;& acy;) is usually cited and praised in terms of its visual accomplishments: the long funeral scene and its "impossible" crane shot, the iconic opening and its floating camera, which ends up underwater. This article, however, examines the sounds of Soy Cuba, specifically its music, effects, multilingual speech (diegetic and extradiegetic), and uses of silence. I consider how Spanish-language dialogue is translated into Russian, what is left untranslated, and how the screenplay, a collaboration between the Cuban writer Enrique Pineda Barnet and Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is performed to lyrical, echoic, and alienating effects. Since much criticism has been dedicated to the visual poetics and the historical significance of the film, I allude to this research, while attending to how sound fits into the conversation and to what extent it contributes to our understanding of the film's newfound resonance among an international audience. Finally, I turn to Eisenstein's early writing on counterpoint uses of sound, on which I rely to demonstrate that the transnationality of Soy Cuba is derived in large part from its use of sound, particularly through its non-naturalistic, contrapuntal strategies.
This paper examines the intersection of time, belonging, and sound in post-Partition India through Anita Desai's novel Clear Light of Day (1980). Temporality has been an essential concern in post-Partition India to date, as extensively shown in state regulations that centralise individuals' perception of time and formalise a unified national identity. Desai's novel, I argue, provides unique sonic solutions to India's temporal homogeneity; it demonstrates how national time is challenged by alternative sonic interventions that integrate diverse forms of national belonging into social landscapes. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's idea of national simultaneity in print capitalism, I construe sound as an alternative medium to facilitate the national simultaneity of post-Partition India. I see Desai's novel as representing the 1980's Indian writers' literary resistance to Nehruvian chrononormativity, which transforms Indian people's shared trauma of Partition into new imaginaries of nationhood, homeland, and futurity. I coin the term "reverberant temporality" to describe the sonic resonance in which new temporal orders are constructed beyond the state monopolisation of time, thus creatively accommodating multiple trajectories of belonging and aspiration. Reverberant temporality actively resists chrononormativity by expanding the scope of national simultaneity, welcoming heterogeneous perceptions of family and social life within and beyond national boundaries.
The silent disco is an event that has only ever received fleeting scholarly attention, usually serving as a convenient allegory for neoliberal capitalist sociality. In this article I provide an ethnographic account of the silent disco, focusing primarily on the silent disco events of promotion company Silent Social. I argue firstly that the silent disco can be understood architecturally as a composite of overlapping physical and virtual spaces, where shared presence in the virtual space of the headphone channel acts as a catalyst for social, physical, or romantic interpersonal closeness. Also, I argue that the normative two-channel system of the silent disco serves to construct a position of alterity for participants to assume, and creates a mild form of partisanship in which participants bond over performatively participating. Thus, the seemingly private and insular features of the silent disco are revealed to be components in ultimately social processes. These processes only come into view when we approach the silent disco on its own terms, not as an icon of one or another mode of sociopolitical organisation.
This article introduces silicon listening as a materially grounded and threshold-oriented mode of machine listening that emerges at the blurry edges of the audible. Drawing on media archaeology, writings in sound studies, and patent analysis, this contribution explores how near-ultrasonic communication and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based audio technologies organise listening in terms of what machines hear and how listening itself is enacted, operationalised and valued. The first part traces the emergence of near-ultrasound as a medium of acoustic data exchange, showing how applications like "SmartTones" and "Things that talk" encode specific assumptions about attention, perception, and the sonic. These systems use the upper range of human hearing to enable machine listening, often in covert or extractive ways. The second part turns to the micro-scale materiality of MEMS microphones - devices that render silicon into a resonating, listening surface. By focussing on their auditory thresholds, the article shows how such components reshape the relation between sound, data, and power, foregrounding sonic connectivity over computation. Ultimately, silicon listening offers a conceptual lens for thinking machine listening beyond AI, centring material, sonic thresholds, and the inaudible as active sites where listening is shaped.
In the 1970s, the World Soundscape Project (WSP) around the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer popularised the term "acoustic ecology" to examine specific interrelations of sound, space, perception, and technology. What was implied when Schafer and his colleagues referred to their project as "ecology"? Where is the historic project of acoustic ecology located epistemologically with regard to other theories of art, media, and ecology? It is my contention that the WSPs work with cybernetic concepts in their media practices offers answers to these questions. Focusing on Schafers reception of Marshall McLuhans concept of "acoustic space", this article examines Schafers practices through the lens of two media theories: thinking through questions of containment and care the paper analyses how Schafer conceptualises modes of adaptation between hearing and the surrounding world. Schafers exercises for modulating perception via "Ear Cleaning" are explored as specific strategies to manage contingency - treating the relationship of environment and perception as something that can and should be changed. With a focus on Schafers seemingly contradictory perspective on tape recordings demonstrated how his practices operationalise a technological openness that his theories both rely on and deny. For it is totality, not contingency that Schafer claims.
In the spirit of a "philology of musical sound", this article aims to shed light on the intricate writing processes that led to the 1906 Essen premiere of Mahler's Sixth Symphony and the subsequent publication of the conductor's score. Starting from the assumption that both knowledge of compositional technique, of musical organology and aural experience gained over years are the fundamental prerequisites for shaping orchestral sound, one might begin by imagining Mahler in the specific listening situations of his profession: the secluded hut where he composed, situated near the mountains, far from the everyday urban background noise, and the various concert halls and their acoustic peculiarities in which he performed his symphonies with various orchestras. In general, the practices of composition and performance can be regarded as different yet interwoven attempts of closing the contingencies of the respective listening situations. In terms of contingency as a constituent of social modernity around 1900, the Sixth Symphony is a Janus-faced work: on the one hand, criticised as a negative example of musical hypertrophy due to its extravagant instrumentation, the symphony can also be interpreted as an attempt to artistically master precisely what the sociologist Georg Simmel at the same time referred to as the hypertrophy of modern urban culture.
This paper explores how digital hearing systems transform auditory experiences through system-sided personalisation and user-sided customisation. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's concept of contingency, it critiques a central paradox: while these devices aim to minimise unpredictability, their rigid settings create new uncertainties that users must actively address. Users navigate the tension between professionally standardised adaptations of digital hearing devices to meet their personal needs and the individual responsibility of customising their hearing through continuous self-monitoring and self-fitting. This challenges traditional notions of "natural" or "normal" and hearing with digital hearing systems, revealing a complex interplay between algorithmic control and user autonomy. By analysing research, ads and exemplary consumer insights in an online hearing forum the paper highlights how digital hearing systems embody a techno-mediated approach to hearing. Users are tasked with reconciling structured auditory norms with personal listening preferences, transforming hearing into a "self-technology" shaped by individual agency within a framework of contingency.
This research explores the transformed aural landscapes through musical sounds and the changes in the sonic environment of Tirana, the capital city of Albania, focusing on two events: the celebration of Albania's Independence Day and the subsequent Christmas market in Tirana. This article focuses on musicscaping as an analytical framework, defined as the active and often intentional shaping of musicscapes through musicking and cultural performance. Specifically, the study investigates how the musicscape and soundscape of Tirana's city centre transformed during these two events. In order to explore these two specific events, I recorded soundscapes and musicscapes in Tirana and also collected materials by applying the soundwalk technique in different parts of the city. I analysed the recorded audiovisual data using a descriptive method and incorporated my auditory experiences from the field into this study as a sonic persona. Consequently, the two events I have discussed in this study encompass all aspects of musicscaping practices such as soundscaping, musicking, musical scenes, fluidity, creating sonic ambiance, cultural performance, construction of an identity, and marketing purposes. Together, the characteristics of musicscaping practices create a distinctive sonic identity and signature associated with Tirana.
