Just 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.

About the Author

Michael C. Heller is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s and founding editor of the journal Jazz and Culture.

Contents

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

Reviews

"In these interwoven essays on the many shades of sonic encounter, Michael Heller invites us to take a soundwalk at the outer edges of the aural. Escorting us through a carefully curated set of case studies, he demonstrates that the way we listen is forged by much more than our ears alone. This provocative book tracks the subtle ways that listening involves the entire body as well as a haze of associations and expectations that drift through all the spaces—from the opera to the composer’s archive, from the corporate vault to the anechoic chamber—that shape our interactions with the universe of sound."–Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

"Just Beyond Listening’s extraordinary and sensitive engagements with sonic histories and practices gently encourage the reader to listen to each case study within the larger network of encounter. Heller’s auto-ethnographic voice quietly contemplates the sound of power and privilege, bringing forth fortissimo and muted stories from the archives. A beautiful work."–Ellie M. Hisama, Dean of the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto

"An utterly unique and compelling work that grapples with complex ideas in an engaging, thoroughly readable, and highly teachable style. Heller’s engagement of affect in relation to sound is a major contribution to sound studies, while at the same time furthering a situated, corporeal, and resonant theory of affect–an exciting contribution to the study of twentieth and twenty-first century music and sound."–Marina Peterson, author of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles

"In a moment when sound studies is deepening its understanding of 'sound' to engage the unheard, the barely audible, and the aurally refused, Michael Heller's Just Beyond Listening offers a gripping collection of case studies that move the disciplinary conversation forward. Heller is two things perhaps above all: a thorough researcher and a gifted, reflexive writer. He has created an accessible book that leads the reader through rich and provocative sonic territory."–Benjamin Tausig, author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews