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KEYWORDS IN SOUND
David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, editors

“There is not a separate entry for ‘SOUND.’ Instead, this über- keyword emerges as a semiotic web, woven by the complementarities and tensions of their entanglements in different intellectual histories.”
– INTRODUCTION

ACOUSTEMOLOGY “Acoustemology asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations.”	STEVEN FELD Distinguished Professor, Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico
ACOUSTICS “Acoustics is a way of knowing about sound, one that brings into focus quantifiable aspects of the matter, force, and motion involved with it.”	BENJAMIN STEEGE Assistant Professor, Music, Columbia University
BODY “Sound knowledge circulates in the ‘feedback’ between body and body, body and environment, body and machine.”	DEBORAH KAPCHAN Associate Professor, Performance Studies, NYU
DEAFNESS “Deafness is a variety of hearing; alternately, it can be conceived as a precondition of hearing or as the resistance to hearing and audism.”	MARA MILLS Assistant Professor, Media, Culture and Communication, NYU
ECHO “Echo is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time passed.”	MARK M. SMITH Carolina Distinguished Professor, History, University of South Carolina
HEARING “Without ears to hear it, there is no sound.”	JONATHAN STERNE James McGill Chair, Culture and Technology, McGill University
IMAGE “Why would sound studies have necessary recourse to a concept more typically to be found in the disciplines of art history or literary studies?”	JOHN MOWITT Professor, Chair of Critical Humanities, University of Leeds
LANGUAGE “Sound studies can enter into critical dialogue with an intellectual history that has largely emphasized language’s cognitive properties at the expense of its sonic enactments.”	DAVID SAMUELS Associate Professor, Music, NYU THOMAS PORCELLO Professor, Anthropology, Vassar College
LISTENING “A person may listen to something intently, absorbed in the sound, but distracted, indifferent, deconcentrated, or even unconscious listening are also possible.”	TOM RICE Lecturer, Anthropology, University of Exeter
MUSIC “Music is an idea, not just a form, and like any other idea, music is a problem.”	MATT SAKAKEENY Associate Professor, Music, Tulane
NOISE “Noise is a powerful antisubject of culture, raising essential questions about the staging of human expression, socialization, individual subjectivity, and political control.”	DAVID NOVAK Associate Professor, Music, University of California, Santa Barbara
PHONOGRAPHY “Phonography combines the Greek phonē (sound,voice) with graphē (writing).”	PATRICK FEASTER Independent Scholar
RADIO “While radio often disappears into the background, moving to the limits of awareness as a supplement to that which it mediates, it also frequently reasserts itself as a force in social life that provokes reflection on mediation.”	DANIEL FISHER Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
RELIGION “The ear is far more than a simple entryway for a divine message. Rather, it is the practical and conceptual site where the task of molding the human senses in accord with the demands of a religious tradition is to be carried out.”	CHARLES HIRSCHKIND Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
RESONANCE “To retrace the hidden history of resonance promises to provide fresh insight into the role of sound in Western thought and cultural practice, a role that has been overlooked by predominantly ocularcentric discourses and paradigms.”	VEIT ERLMANN Endowed Chair of Music History, Music, University of Texas at Austin
SILENCE “The tension between the apparent acoustic impossibility of silence and the intensely contrasting experiences it provokes lies at the heart of the types of presence and affect invoked by the term.”	ANA MARÍA OCHOA GAUTHIER Associate Professor, Music/Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University
SPACE “Imagine sound without space, vibrating everywhere and nowhere.”	ANDREW EISENBERG Visiting Assistant Professor, Music, NYU Abu Dhabi
SYNTHESIS “The history of sound synthesis manifests the renewable promises of technologies to improve on what presents itself in nature.”	TARA RODGERS Independent Scholar and Composer
TRANSDUCTION “A loudspeaker is a transducer. A microphone is a transducer. A telephone is a transducer. During the twentieth century, the human ear came itself to be described as a transducer.”	STEFAN HELMREICH Elting E. Morison Professor, Anthropology, MIT
VOICE “Almost before we can speak of the sound itself, we attribute the voice to someone or something.”	AMANDA WEIDMAN Associate Professor, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr

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