The Audiable: An Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Prelude 1
4. Sound and Knowledge 3
5. The Audiable: An Introduction 4
6. Some Leitmotifs 7
7. The Standard of Vision 8
8. A Philosophy of Listening? 11
9. Constructive Description 14
10. Sight, Sound, and Language 16
11. The Sound of Words 25
12. Seeing, Saying, and Hearing 27
13. Music in the Air 40
14. “No Sound without Music” 50
15. Language and the Human 51
16. Lord Bacon’s Echoes 53
17. Ripple Effects: Distant Voices 56
18. The Infinite Broadcast 60
19. Immanence 64
20. Reading Transfigured: St. Augustine 66
21. To the Life: The Image 69
22. Moving Pictures 71
23. Modern Times: The Cartoon 72
24. The Sound of Meaning 76
25. Music and the Audiable: A Suite in Three Movements 78
26. Plato’s Singing School 81
27. Musical Synesthesia 83
28. The Music of Language 85
29. The Soundscape 86
30. Song 88
31. Noise and Silence 91
32. Fish, Flesh, or Fowl 92
33. Sensory Hybrids 96
34. “Waiting to Be the Music” 106
35. Circle Songs 109
36. Forty-Part Motets 110
37. The Ether 113
38. Elemental Media 115
39. Elemental Fluids 116
40. Writing the Soundscape 120
41. Haunting Melodies 123
42. The Lifelike: The Undead 130
43. Beyond Words? 133
44. The Audiable and the Audible 143
45. Into Silence 144
46. Enchantments of the Name 147
47. The Inaudible 152
48. On Saying “I am” 155
49. The Shriek 162
50. Metal 163
51. Here Comes That Song Again 165
52. The Mirror of Silence 172
53. Rhythmic Hearing 174
54. Media All the Way Down 175
55. The Auditory Window 178
56. Cacophony: Dispossession (Beckett) 181
57. Euphony: Repossession (Beckett) 183
58. Worldly Dissonance 185
59. Sounds of Battle: The Civil War 186
60. Sounds of Battle: World War I 188
61. Ulysses in Auschwitz 194
62. Intermezzo 197
63. Sounding Bodies 198
64. Pandemonium? 202
65. Songs of Entropy 204
66. By Hand 207
67. Past and Present 208
68. Consciousness 210
69. Acknowledgments 221
70. Index 241