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University of California Press

The Hum of the World

A Philosophy of Listening
by Lawrence Kramer (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $22.95 / £20.00
Publication Date: Jun 2021
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780520382992
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 3 b/w illus.
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About the Book

The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. This innovative meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure waiting when we learn that the world is alive with sound.

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, is an award-winning composer and the author of fifteen previous books, most of them with University of California Press, including The Thought of Music, winner of the 2017 ASACP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism.

From Our Blog

Quiet, Silence, Sound: Thoughts on the Hum of the World

By Lawrence Kramer, author of The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of ListeningSound in recent years has escaped its traditionally subordinate relationship to sight and become the object of widespread interest. Sound Studies is a flourishing field. But much of the work done under this rubric has c
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Table of Contents

Prelude
Sound and Knowledge
The Audiable: An Introduction
Some Leitmotifs
The Standard of Vision
A Philosophy of Listening?
Constructive Description
Sight, Sound, and Language
The Sound of Words
Seeing, Saying, and Hearing
The Audiable: Variations on a Theme
Music in the Air
“No Sound without Music”
Language and the Human
Lord Bacon’s Echoes
Ripple Effects: Distant Voices
The Infinite Broadcast
Immanence
Reading Transfigured: St. Augustine
To the Life: The Image
Moving Pictures
Modern Times: The Cartoon
The Sound of Meaning
Music and the Audiable: A Suite in Three Movements
Plato’s Singing School
Musical Synesthesia
The Music of Language
The Soundscape
Song
Noise and Silence
Fish, Flesh, or Fowl
Sensory Hybrids
“Waiting to Be the Music”
Circle Songs
Forty-Part Motets
The Ether
Elemental Media
Elemental Fluids
Writing the Soundscape
Haunting Melodies
The Lifelike: The Undead
Beyond Words? 1
The Audiable and the Audible
Into Silence
Enchantments of the Name
The Inaudible
On Saying “I am”
The Shriek
Metal
Here Comes That Song Again
The Mirror of Silence
Rhythmic Hearing
Media All the Way Down
The Auditory Window
Cacophony: Dispossession (Beckett)
Euphony: Repossession (Beckett)
Worldly Dissonance
Sounds of Battle: The Civil War
Sounds of Battle: World War I
Ulysses in Auschwitz
Intermezzo
Sounding Bodies
Pandemonium?
Songs of Entropy
By Hand
Past and Present
Consciousness

Acknowledgments
Index

Reviews

"Summing Up: Recommended." 
— CHOICE
An Alex Ross "Bookshelf" recommendation 
— The Rest is Noise
"The Hum of the World is a more-than-intriguing read and definitely one that will get you thinking about the role of sound within a cosmic context. . . . Recommended."
— Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians
“A masterpiece.”—Michael Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject 

“This book is a meditation on the ways in which sound both permeates life and mediates our experience of living. In distinct and poetic language, Kramer argues that the practice of meaning making is rooted in and swells out of sound.”—Nina Eidsheim, author of The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

"The Hum of the World opens our ears to the primacy of sound. Dispelling the enduring myth that knowledge is inherently visual, it is a triumphant celebration of music and language as the forces that give shape to the world by dramatizing and interpreting its auditory substance. Kramer’s virtuosity as a prose writer reinforces this point: every sentence resonates with fresh understanding and aural acuity, gracefully voiced to the accompaniment of a discrete yet immense erudition. This book will change the way you listen to life."  —Axel Englund, author of Still Songs: Music in and around the Poetry of Paul Celan