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University of California Press

About the Book

From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life.
 
Experiencing Sound presents its subject as fundamental to all experience—sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience.
 
Through a series of brief, lyrical forays, Kramer shows that sound, whether heard or unheard, is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer—or be made to suffer—as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew.

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of fifteen previous books, including The Thought of Music, The Hum of the World, and Music and the Forms of Life. He is also an award-winning composer whose works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface 

Introduction 

1. June 24, 2019: The Wind on Mars 
2. Listening for the Llamas 
3. Auditory Epiphanies 
4. Sound and World 
5. Listening to Silence 
6. Calm Sea: Going Nowhere, Hearing Nothing 
7. Prisons of Silence 
8. Just One Sound 
9. Song and Sound 
10. Already Music 
11. Coming Alive 
12. The Vocal Telegraph 
13. The Ravished Ear 
14. Campaniles 
15. Cannonades 
16. Soundless Hearing 
17. The Talking Dead 
18. From Sounds to Sound 
19. Fictitious Sounds 
20. Bells 
21. Dis/Embodiment 
22. Threads 
23. Playback 
24. Shorthand 
25. Poems to Music 
26. Grooves 
27. Grooves II: Spacing 
28. Beyond Analogy 
29. Phonogram and Gramophone 
30. Forest Murmurs 
31. Epithet 
32. Mesmerizing Sound 
33. Cathay 
34. Night. A Street. No Lamps. 
35. The Resonating Cure 
36. The Voice of Language 
37. Nocturne. Another City. 
38. Annals of Slavery: A Violin 
39. The Grammar of Uncertainty 
40. Aftersounds
41. Persistence of Hearing 
42. Annals of Slavery II: A Vigil 
43. A Voice in a Box 
44. The Contralto Mystique: Intercession 
45. The Contralto Mystique II: Departure 
46. Two Lynchings 
47. “White Christmas”: Saigon, 1975 
48. The Ghetto: New York, 1904 
49. Testimony 
50. Voice 
51. Inner Speech 
52. The Deafness of Narcissus 
53. Sound in the Making 
54. Housewarming 
55. Language Dead or Alive 
56. Hearing Plato’s Cave 
57. Speaking and Being 
58. Minding the Senses 
59. LP: Longplayer 
60. Harmonies of the World 
61. Uneven Measures 
62. Sound, Finitude, Music 
63. The Shards of the Infinite 
64. A Passing Synthesis 
65. Aeolian Visitations 
66. Harmonizing 

Notes 
Index 

Reviews

"This wide-ranging book reveals Lawrence Kramer's command of poetry, novels, music, philosophy, history, and other topics too numerous to list. Refreshingly free of jargon, Experiencing Sound should be required reading for anyone who cares about how we understand ourselves and navigate the world through sound."—Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

"Kramer ventures far off the beaten paths of sound studies. With inspiring intellectual ease, he strolls with his reader across the whole of Western cultural history, inviting us to hear music, literature, and philosophy in entirely new ways. This is the work of a master essayist."—Axel Englund, author of Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage