Description
Book SynopsisJust 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.
Table of ContentsContents
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
