Description
Book SynopsisFrom its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a dif
Trade ReviewSalomé Voegelin is a brilliant and subtle thinker about sound and music, so
Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, Revised Edition is a deeply explored and essential study of the necessity of listening, of openly absorbing what sound tells us of our shared world, listening which gives us access to the fluid nature of relationships and connections, to the interactive web of the world and our participation in it through awareness of this 'complex continuity' and of ourselves inextricably enmeshed within it. Salomé Voegelin generously maps many ways of practicing listening to sonic worlds and of sharing access to the ever-expanding “possible world” of sound-life, then goes further, leaping beyond our physical and conceptual limits, diving into sound we cannot hear but which affects us, becoming part of our apprehensible world and of our learning how to live within it. * Annea Lockwood, Composer and Professor Emeritus, Vassar College, USA *
The first edition of this book opened up new ways of thinking about sound and listening, which seemed provocative at the time, engaging with “possible world theory,” speculating on what and how sound means without referring it to the visual, and proposing a continuum of hearing between sound art and music. In this highly anticipated and essential new edition, Voegelin thinks about bodies and presents with rigor and extraordinary clarity the way sound may open us up to the plural possibility of bodily existence. Effortlessly interlacing phenomenology, feminist and queer theories, and weaving together sound thought and practice, while remaining precise yet accessible, the author invites us to listen to our own and each other’s bodies, enjoy their transforming, hybrid and even monstrous capacities, and discover the emancipatory force of their soundings. * Mikhail Karikis, film director and Professor, MIMA School of Art & Design, Teesside University, UK *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Landscape as Sonic Possible World 2. Into the World of the Work: The Possibility of Sound Art 3. Sonic Materialism: the Sound of Stones 4. Hearing the Continuum of Sound 5. Listening to the Inaudible: the Sound of Unicorns 6. Possible and Impossible Bodies
Notes Bibliography List of works Index
