Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition: Hearing the Continuum of Sound

Description

From 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. Creating Sonic Possible Worlds, such a phenomenological modality offers a new analytical framework that listens across genres and times to hear the continuum between sound art and music and to grasp the plurality of the world. 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 works by ÁineO’Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds’ radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound. Thus, the word continuum in the subtitle of this book, Hearing the Continuum of Sound, which in the first edition stood principally for the continuum between music and sound art, is opened up to denote also another continuum that stands as principle for the body, while including that of sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies Breathing, between humans-humanoid aliens-monsters-vampires-animals-plants-things-and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call. Cover page Halftitle page Praise Title page Copyright page CONTENTS PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Introduction CHAPTER ONE The landscape as sonic possible world Listening to the possibility of the landscape The possible time and space of sound: Palm houses and ghost trains El Tren Fantasma (2011) (inspired by Pierre Schaeff er) Sonic environment as possible timespace world An affective geography of possible worlds, generating the sonic environment Face as Territory/Viso Come Territorio (2012) Reciprocating the affect: Listening to a sonic possible life-world The possibilities of the acousmatic landscape Through the Looking-Glass: Buildings [New York] (2001) Conclusion: Phenomenological possibilism CHAPTER TWO Into the world of the work: The possibility of sound art The sound artwork as environment: Cells and murmurs Listening across works: Aesthetic accessibility Sonic centering, decentering, and recentering Chimerization, Hinge (2012) and 3 Channel Chronics (2010–12) Sound words Sonic representation, reference, and truth An ethical center of listening Performing the shape of things themselves Conclusion: Consequences of a contingent sonic truth CHAPTER THREE Sonic materialism: The sound of stones Hastening Westward (1995) Conceptual sound Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) The sonic thing The sound of stones: The material of histories and geographies 30 Minutes of Listening (2012) Sonic crossing: Intertwining without fissure Myriad Mouth Line (2013) Crossing geography: Crossing identity I keep falling at you (2010) The magnitude and might of sound Conclusion: There is no sonic sublime CHAPTER FOUR Hearing the continuum of sound Organized, disorganized, and reorganized sound Ein Überlebender aus Warschau op. 46 (1947) Vertical music Rothko Chapel (1972) Musical worlds Fantaisie variée, piano, orchestra (1912) Musical geography Music of the Spheres (1938)18 A joint critical framework Weite, Weisse Stille—Vast White Stillness (2013) Conclusion: The un-sound and the unheard CHAPTER FIVE Listening to the inaudible: The sound of unicorns Electrical Walks (2004–) The sound of unicorns But what about the sound of the unicorn, what is its name? Inaudible soundscapes Ultrasonic Scapes (2011) The sound of impossible things The aesthetic inaudible The politics ofpossible-impossible-inaudible-things Sounds from Beneath (2010–12) and SeaWomen (2012) Sonic horizons CHAPTER SIX Sonic possible and impossible bodies Prosthetics (2018) The fictional body in an autobiographical and auto-ethnographic frame Voices for Estória IV (1980) Vampiric Silences Hipposkampos (2017) Conclusion: Micro-turbulence, mountains and other bodies In the Shadow of the Silent Mountain (2019) NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF WORKS INDEX