New Books in Sound Studies

Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembrance of God) informs sensorial experiences of the divine, particularly intimate ones, while the discussion on meditating on Muhammad considers the bodily aspects of Prophet Muhammad, such as his saliva, urine, and sweat that influence mawlid literatures and ritual performance of them within Sufi communities like the Naqshbandi-Haqqanis. Though rituals emerging from embodied understandings of holy figures are not without some tension, as we learn throughout the book but especially during the discussion on graves. Here the interred bodies of Sufi saints are caught up in debates around the permissibility of shrine visitation, a topic that comes up amongst lectures given by Swedish Muslim leaders. Overall, then, through analysis of Danish and Swedish podcast materials, ritual practices, such as devotion to the Prophet Muhammad and Sufi saints, we understand more about the sonic and pious dimensions of Islam and the Muslim authorial voices and listening that shapes them. This book will be of interest to those who work on sound studies, material culture, Sufism and Islam in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024) is a collected edition about Pedagogies of Care edited by Colleen Renihan, John Spilker-Beed, and Trudi Wright are experienced music history educators working in the United States and Canada. They have curated a collection of essays that explore what it means to prioritize care when teaching, interacting with students, developing course syllabi, and curricula. Far more than simply treating students with dignity and compassion, pedagogies of care can infiltrate every aspect of teaching and higher education by centering the interests of students, instructors, and the larger communities to which they belong. As the essays in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. The premise of the book is that care-based approaches to pedagogy can facilitate the systemic transformation that remains both possible and necessary for musicology, other disciplines, and institutions of higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023) introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. Thinking with an Accent won the American Comparative Literature Association's 2024 Rene Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection. Editors: Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems. Staring around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology and representation and rhetoric and identity, but what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does a life develop a kind of texture of feeling over time? Affect studies is field interested in these questions, interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but affect isn't reducible to words. So, it's easy to see why affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars.  Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We'll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University's Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he's currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing.  In this conversation, we explore:  the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey  2001's strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.” why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking's voice didn't make it into the voice of Siri the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Ever wonder who's to blame for the noise and distraction of the open office? Our guest has answers. Joseph L. Clarke is a historian of art and architecture and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His 2021 book Echo's Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space won a 2022 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It's a fascinating history of how architects have conceived of and manipulated the relationship between sound and space. His most recent publication is “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.”  In this episode we'll talk about media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his architecturally inspired theory of acoustic space, which went on to have its own influence in the field of architecture. We'll also dive deep into the history of the open plan office, the theories of acoustic communication that inspired it, the sonic disaster it became, and the new media technologies that were invented in response. If you've ever been driven to distraction by noise in a cubicle farm or open office and wondered how such a space came to be, this episode's got answers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we bring you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director, Robin Miles. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She's the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other? For our Patrons we have almost an hour of additional content, including our What's Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! If you want hear all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three dollars a month and helps pay the expenses of producing the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today's guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you're a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013. Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in the future. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss Carolyn's career and both of her books. We also get into the present state of radio and media studies, as well as the kind of skeptical orientation to media that tends to set sound studies scholars apart from many of their peers. And for our Patrons we'll have Carolyn's What's Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower.  Today's show was edited by Matt Parker. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space? Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Later, WATS became much more ambitious, producing live sonic odysseys in 8-channel surround sound and live online sound journeys during the pandemic. Since then, Harnett and Hoff have embarked on another project. For the past couple of years, they have been partnering with different universities to translate humanities research into compelling sound-designed narrative podcasts. The first season of Ways of Knowing was produced in partnership with the University of Washington and it focused on different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The second season just wrapped up. It's called Cosmic Visions and it's produced in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and that's what we'll hear an episode from today. Just this week, they dropped the last episode of season two and now the entire series is available on The World According to Sound website. We wanted to draw your attention to this series because turning humanities research and sound art into a sonic narrative experience was the original mission of Phantom Power. We know that many of you are interested in this area of humanities podcasting as well, so if you're not already a fan of Chris and Sam's work, check it out. We also wanted to share this particular episode because it also provides one answer to a tricky question: How do you do a sonic explication of something that is entirely visual?   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) who have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP released by Siren Recordings in 2025 and is available from Spotify. The conversation starts with a discussion of Anne's epic, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffee House Press, 2011). Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman's place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry. The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman's monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman's themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history. Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically YDIR blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to YDIR is, in a word, empowering. More about Your Devotee in Rags: Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning. Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix. Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman, genius player, composer, scholar, in one of Hal's unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.” Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence—whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.” More about Anne Waldman: Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost. More about Andrew Whiteman: Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets' Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today Mack talks about one of his oldest companions, the tinnitus that lives rent-free in his head. Tinnitus can be annoying, for sure–and for some people it's much worse than annoying–but it also has a lot to say of interest, if we're willing to listen: “Tinnitus has been my guide in sound studies, my Virgil, leading me through a shadow world of sound. It's taught me how high the stakes can be when it comes to the perception and control of sound and it's given me new ways to think about how and why we use media devices.” Today we'll learn the basics of tinnitus and hear some tinnitus stories–everyone with tinnitus has one and these stories can teach us a lot about sound and the self. Maybe tinnitus has earned that rent-free headspace, after all. Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Music is by Joel Styzens. The composition “A Sharp” appears on his album Relax Your Ears.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Warren Zanes is a “rockstar biographer” in more ways than one: he has experienced life as a rockstar, a biographer, and a biographer of rockstars. When Mack first met Warren in New Orleans sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, Zanes was then emerging from the wreckage of meteoric success. He'd been the teenage guitarist in critically acclaimed band The Del Fuegos, who briefly broke into the national popular consciousness—and then just plain broke up. But in the years since, Zanes remade himself into one of our most erudite and entertaining public scholars of popular music. Among other things, he's been Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning film Twenty Feet from Stardom, a producer on the Grammy-nominated PBS/Soundbreaking series, and he conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary. All while keeping up a solo recording career with collaborators such as the Dust Brothers. Warren's books include the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Dusty in Memphis; Petty: The Biography and Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records. His latest book is called Deliver Me from Nowhere. On its face, it's a book about the making of Bruce Springsteen's classic lo-fi album Nebraska. But it's also about sound technology, musicianship teetering in a moment between the analog and digital eras, what it means to be in a band, and the relationship between the four-track cassette recorder and social alienation in Reagan era. In this interview, Warren talks about his journey, the recent book, his craft as a writer, and—as part of our mini-theme this season on audiobooks—the process of narrating his own audiobooks and why he does so.  And for our Patrons we'll have Warren's What's Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower.  Today's show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Russian Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Radio Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Media Society, and more.  Elena's someone I'm always excited to talk to when I see her at conferences and I thought it would be fun talk to her on this podcast. In this episode we discuss some of her research interests including U.S. radio history, audience research, music recommendation and recognition algorithms, and her current book project, which centers on freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music.  Toward the end of the episode we talk about Elena's research strategies as a historian working in the digital age.  And for our Patrons we'll have Elena's What's Good segment, featuring something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Today's show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances.  Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He's also the editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011, Routledge). Matt's latest book is titled Reader's Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022, Stanford University Press).  In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the long history of recorded literature; the weird shame around audiobook reading and its cultural roots; the interplay between disability, neurodivergence, and alternate forms of reading; and what an audiobook criticism might look like.  And for our patrons, we'll have our What's Good segment at the end of the show, where Matt will tell us something good to read, something good to listen to. Something good to do. You can become a patron of the show at patreon.com/phantompower. Today's show was edited by Mack Hagood. Transcription by Katelyn Phan. Music by Graeme Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Punjab Sounds (Routledge, 2024) nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the region only emerges in 'regioning', i.e., in words, gestures, objects, and techniques that do the region. Regioning sound reveals the relationship between sound and the region in three interlinked ways: in doing, knowing, and feeling the region through sound. The volume covers several musical genres of the Punjab region, including within its geographical remit the Punjabi diaspora and east and west Punjab. It also provides new understandings of the role that ephemeral cultural expressions, especially music and sound, play in the formulation of Punjabi identity. Featuring contributions from scholars across North America, South Asia, Europe, and the UK, it brings together diverse perspectives. The chapters use a range of different methods, ranging from computational analysis and ethnography to close textual analysis, demonstrating some of the ways in which research on music and sound can be carried out. The chapters will be relevant for anyone working on Punjab's music, including the Punjabi diaspora, music, and sound in the Global South. Moreover, it will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the following areas: ethnomusicology, cultural studies, film studies, music studies, South Asian studies, Punjab studies, history, and sound studies, among others. Radha Kapuria is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Durham University, UK, and the author of Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, and Connoisseurs, 1800–1947. Vebhuti Duggal is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi, and Associate Editor of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Khadeeja Amenda is PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit's recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of echoes reminds us that our own agency and creativity reside in repetitions that respond to the past.  For our Patreon members we the full two-hour conversation with Amit's “What's Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne UP, 2005), Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford UP, 2019), and Echo (MIT Press, 2022). He is co-editor of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh; Palgrave, 2009) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou; Palgrave, 2013). His work has appeared in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Media & Society, and Theory, Culture & Society. Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music by Graeme Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

In Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition, Lauren Osborne delves into the sonic dimensions of Islam, exploring how the tradition's rich soundscape offers deep insights into culture, identity, and spirituality. In this innovative work, Osborne shifts the focus from the written word to the auditory, asking, "What can we learn about Islam when we enter through its sounds, instead of books?" This approach provides a unique lens through which to study the intersections of modernity, belonging, and pluralism in Muslim-majority cultures. The book explores the centrality of sound within Islam, from the recitation of the Qur'an to the daily practices of prayer, the call to prayer (adhaan), and the sonic expressions found in Islamic chantings, nasheeds, qawwalis, and even contemporary genres like hip-hop. Osborne also tackles the underexplored intersection of deafness and Islam, shedding light on how the experience of deafness intersects with a traditionally "hearing" religion. In today's interview, Osborne discusses the core themes of the book, including the debates around music's role in Islam, the relationship between Sufism and music, and the significant cultural conversations surrounding hip-hop's place within the Islamic world. This book is an essential resource for students of Islam, religious studies, world music, and anyone interested in the profound role of sound in shaping human experiences across diverse cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and crucially how all of this us impacting on the publishing industry. The research also picks up on important themes of continuity and change represented by audiobooks, from ongoing issues of inequalities through to the new forms of writing practice and AI generated narrators. A richly detailed but easily accessible text, the book is essential reading for scholars across academia, as well as anyone interested in reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage's visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage's experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.  For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack's “What's Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Writing and media content featured in this episode:  Mack's essay “Cage's Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).  Nam June Paik's 1973 video Global Groove  John Cage's 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy  John Cage's book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961). The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium  Terry Gross's 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox  The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra  Shani Diluka's performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass  Amit Pinchevsky's book Echo (MIT, 2022) Helen Rees' book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011) Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.  Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology (University of California Press, 2024) reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to the longstanding battles between stereo and mono technologies.  Throughout the book, Eric Dienstfrey analyzes newly discovered archival materials and myriad stereo releases, from Hell's Angels (1930) to Get Out (2017), to show how Hollywood's financial dependence on mono prevented filmmakers from seeing surround sound's full aesthetic potential. Though studios initially explored stereo's unique capabilities, Dienstfrey details how filmmakers eventually codified a conservative set of surround-sound techniques that prevail today, despite the arrival of more immersive formats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype.   For our Patreon members we have “What's Good” recommendations from Steph and Hussein on what to read, listen to, and do. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower.  About our guests: Steph Ceraso is Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Virginia. She's one of Mack's go-to folks when trying to figure out how to use audio production in the classroom as a form of student composition. Steph's research and teaching interests include multimodal composition, sound studies, pedagogy, digital rhetoric, disability studies, sensory rhetorics, music, and pop culture.  Hussein Boon is Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He's a multi-instrumentalist, session musician, composer, modular synth researcher, and AI researcher. He also has a vibrant YouTube presence with tutorials on things like Ableton Live production.  Pieces featured in this episode:  “Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity” by Steph Ceraso in Sounding Out (2022).  “In the Future” by Hussein Boon in Riffs (2022).  Mack also mentioned in his rant:  “Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language” by Jerome Feldman and Srinivas Narayanan (2003).  “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” by George Lakoff (1992).  Today's show was produced and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

In Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music (Transcript Verlag, 2023), composer Tiziano Manca investigates the premises for and consequences of a major change in his compositional practice: this change emphasizes the temporality of sound and, more recently, the relationship between sounding body and musician. It calls into question the traditional conception of composition and its relation to sound material. Accordingly, Manca examines the theoretical and aesthetic reasons for this shift by interweaving aesthetic reflection on his work with historical research on the notion of musical material and the theory of sound production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Brian Harnetty's recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty's musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.  In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian's process. Harnetty's audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.  This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we've heard.  (And, of course, we'll have a longer version of the interview and our What's Good segment for our Patrons.) Who was Thomas Merton? Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It's hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948's “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.  Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.” Brian Harnetty Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire). Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University's Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine's “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we've been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology.  We first came across Maya's work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, an online initiative from Ms. magazine honoring the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman's birth in 1822. It's a remarkable package that adds many dimensions of understanding of the underground railroad conductor and feminist icon: Her experience of disability due to a blow to the head by a white overseer; her creation of a home for the aged; her love of the natural world; and much more. And to us, the richest of these essays was Maya's the “Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” which used field recordings, historical research, and ethnomusicological research to explore the roles of sound and music, and voice in Tubman's life and leadership. The piece included a Spotify playlist so you could listen as you read.  Today, we're thrilled to bring you what we hope will be an even more immersive experience: Maya Cunningham reading her essay, and thanks to the editing and mixing skills of Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami, her field recordings and playlist selections are mixed into the story.  And just a quick note, you're going to hear about the American Christian revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which stirred both Black and white people from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. You'll also hear about the Invisible Church, where enslaved African Americans were able to worship secretly and autonomously and through the singing of folk spirituals, which differed greatly from white religious music at the time, but would go on to influence not only gospel music but pretty much every form of popular music we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, a great place to start is a book edited by two professors Mack studied with at Indiana University, Drs. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby. It's called African American Music: An Introduction.  And today, we share our Patrons-only segment, “What's Good,” in our main feed. Maya will recommend something good to read, listen to, and do.  Today's musical selections and soundscapes are by Maya Cunningham. The show was mixed and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. The Harriet Tubman image was created by Maddie Haynes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we speak to Hildegard Westerkamp, the pioneering composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. The centerpiece of all of her work is a close attention to the sonic environment and its relation to culture. We will listen to excerpts of six soundscape compositions made between 1975 and 2005, all of which reward the close listener–conceptually and aesthetically–with a deeper relationship to the sonic environment.  Mack Hagood interviewed Westerkamp shortly after the death of R. Murray Schafer in late 2021. Westerkamp worked closely with Schafer in the early 1970s and she graciously agreed to talk about him despite the grief being fresh. They also discussed her own amazing career and that's the part of the tape we are sharing in this episode. They talk about her formative years as a 20-something working with Schafer and his World Soundscape Project and then we jump into a number of her compositions, ending with the piece “Breaking News” from 2012.  Incredibly, she said Mack was the first person to ever ask her about that piece, even though it is one of her favorites. And sure enough, not long after this interview she released a retrospective album on Earsay Music called Breaking News, which features that piece and a number of others created between 1988 and 2012.  For our Patreon members we have the full, unedited interview for those who want to hear all her thoughts on R. Murray Schafer and her career. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower.  And a quick correction: Hildegard wanted me to clarify that the sentence “When there is no sound, hearing is most alert,” which she uses in “Whisper Study,” is a quote from the Indian mystic Kirphal Singh in his book Naam (or Word). Pieces featured in this episode:  “Gently Penetrating beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place” (1997) “Whisper Study” (1975) “Fantasie for Horns” (1978) “A Walk through the City” (1981) “Für Dich – For You” (2005) “Breaking News” (2002) Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

What makes sounds “religious”? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds. Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) implements a “sonic turn” in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, in this volume editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett propose an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, the editors present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations, demonstrating that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate. Carola E. Lorea is Assistant Professor of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen. She worked as a research fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute, International Institute for Asian Studies, Gonda Foundation, and Südasien-Institut (Heidelberg). Her first monograph is Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016). Rosalind I. J. Hackett is Extraordinary Professor, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Chancellor's Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. She is Past President and Honorary Life Member, International Association for the History of Religions. Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Today we talk to Dallas Taylor, host of the most popular sound podcast on the planet, Twenty Thousand Hertz. I like to think our show sounds pretty good, but Twenty Thousand Hertz is next-level audio production, some of the very best in the podcasting business. And Dallas prides himself on making a podcast for absolutely everyone. As he told me, he tries to make a show that's just as mainstream and approachable as a true crime show.  We start off with a chat about Dallas's background in music, how he entered the world of sound design, what inspired him to start the podcast, and how he was discovered by Roman Mars of the legendary design podcast 99% Invisible.  Then we jump into the nuts and bolts of how he and his team make Twenty Thousand Hertz. Dallas was kind enough to share the stems for my favorite episode, titled “Space,” so we will do a Song Exploder-like anatomy of that episode before listening to the full episode in the second half of the show. Today's show was edited by Craig Eley with additional help from Ravi Krishnaswami. Our Production Coordinator and transcriber is Jason Meggyesy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives.  In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It's a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don't really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life.  David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he's President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he's co-authored and edited several others.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public education project of teaching people to make their own no-power, low-budget radios called open-wave receivers. They've held radio-making workshops in Portugal, France, and the UK and they've published a how-to in Make magazine. I wanted to talk to the Shortwave Collective because they are presenting a radically different vision of what radio is and can be. Radio's history can be thought of as an extended expression of military, political, commercial, and cultural dominance. But the Collective embraces play, experimentation, failure, community, and open listening in their feminist radio practice. So, let's talk to the Shortwave Collective and see if we can rethink radio–what it's for and what it can do.   And in the second half of the show, we'll hear an audio documentary in which the Shortwave Collective teaches you how to make your own open-wave receiver. Special thanks for appearing on the show to Shortwave Collective members Lisa Hall, ​Alyssa Moxley, Georgia Muenster, and Maria Papadomanolaki. The other Collective members are Sally A. Applin, Kate Donovan, Brigitte Hart, and Hannah Kemp-Welch.  Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood with technical assistance from Craig Eley. Today's music is by Graeme Gibson with additional sound design elements by Cris Cheek and Shortwave Collective. Phantom Power's production team includes Craig Eley, Ravi Krishnaswami, and Amy Skjerseth. Our Production Coordinator and transcriber is Jason Meggyesy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI's use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes. In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power. Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, 2024) is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

On today's show, we address a performer's nightmare—the nightmare of not being able to hear yourself onstage. My guest is ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday, who takes us behind the scenes of the famed Cirque du Soleil to learn how even Cirque's world-class musicians struggle with technology when they want to hear themselves.  Building on his international career as a touring sound technician, ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday researches the working communities and hidden labor of live sound technicians on large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Today Jake takes us behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil, sharing his dissertation research on how sound engineers and musicians negotiate the power to hear oneself.  Stage monitoring, the technology that allows musicians to hear the performance as they play, is a topic we rarely hear about, but it's absolutely essential to performers. Faraday suggests that, while new in-ear monitors are marketed as a godsend for performers, they are more of a mixed blessing, “homogenizing listening” and creating new kinds of issues and anxieties for musicians.   Today's show was edited and mixed by Jacob Danson Faraday, with additional editing by Mack Hagood.  The song “Sail Away” by Colton Benjamin (2017) was obtained from the Free Multitrack Download Library on the Cambridge Music Technology website by Mike Senior, author of the excellent book Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio.  Read the dissertation: Buried in the mix: touring sound technicians, sonic control, and emotional labour on Cirque du Soleil's Corteo by Jacob Danson Faraday (2021).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he's into called Love is the Message.  We're glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence's name from his great book on Arthur Russell. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and a prolific author. Tim and Jeremy have been longtime collaborators and when the clubs closed and universities cut faculty hours due to covid, they started podcasting.  The way I'd describe their show is, imagine the amazing college class you never got to take where you learn about the intersections of global dance music and radical politics, from the 1960s to today. They do shows on disco, Motown, reggae, tropicalia, funk, you name it with a strong cultural studies perspective. And I think the episode we're going to hear today is a perfect example of their approach—it's ostensibly an episode about Fela Kuti, but it's also terrific seminar on the Black Atlantic and the political history of Nigeria.  So thanks, Ben, for the recommendation. Thanks, Tim and Jem for sharing the pod with me and doing this episode swap. And thanks everyone for listening. Talk next month! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

It's summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We've also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There's other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned! But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin's Sound Expertise. For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there's a great chance you're already a subscribe. That's because Will's show is fantastic and I personally know many music scholars who are devoted fans of this show that features conversations with established and up-and-coming music scholars. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dr. Robin, you might remember that I quoted his New York Times obituary of R. Murray Schafer in our first episode on Schafer. He has written about music for the Times for at least a decade. He's also an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland and the author of the book Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music. Sound Expertise will be dropping its third season in the fall. The episode you are about to hear is one that I love as a media scholar. Will Robin interviews Dr. Paula Harper about her work on viral music videos and taste, specifically that terrible Rebecca Black video “Friday” that's probably still rattling around in some dark recess of your brain. Dr. Harper digs into the awful virality of that video and all of its cover versions, discerning what this case study can tell us about genre, gender, and how and why sound travels on the internet. It's a great discussion and I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, since this interview happened, Paula Harper has joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of music. So, who says YouTube rots your brain?   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it's taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties' “phenomenology of impairment.” This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don't need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two. All of this episode's sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in: Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne's thyroid cancer treatment Volte: An instrumental post rock band The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies. You can read Jonathan Sterne's cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

In part two of our three-part series “Voices,” we feature an exciting new voice in the world of sound studies, Stacey Copeland.  In part one last month, we examined the role voices play in professional sports and unpacked some of the understandings of ability and masculinity that inform the sound of the quarterback's voice in the NFL. Copeland's audio documentary, “This is the Sound of My Voice,” examines another group of professionals—women broadcasters and podcasters, who struggle with sonic sexism from male colleagues, audiences, and sometimes, even themselves. The documentary was originally presented on radio in three parts, but Stacey graciously edited a shorter version for this episode of Phantom Power. Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University's School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program where she studied with a focus on radio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson University with a minor in English and a specialization in audio production for radio, music and film. It was during her Master's work that Copeland co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto, Canada based feminist community radio collective. Currently, she is the supervising producer at Amplify Podcast Network, a collaborative project dedicated to reimagining the sound of scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we're listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It's about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn't just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it's a competition of audibility and vocal toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us.  Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series. Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don't have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here. Other things heard or mentioned in this episode: “The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020. “The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg's Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

This episode, we take you behind the scenes of Phantom Power. Producer/host Mack Hagood was invited by Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead to be a guest on their show, The Podcast Studies Podcast. As you may or may not know, there are a lot of academics out there not only making podcast themselves but also studying podcasts and podcasting as a genre and an industry–and Dario and Lori are in that camp. Their podcast is a tremendous resource for those who want to understand this emerging academic field. In the interview, Dario prompted Mack to go pretty deep into the production of Phantom Power, exploring the techniques and philosophy behind the show, as well as the potential Mack sees for podcasting as a format for generating scholarly knowledge. And after the interview, Lori had some intriguing comments about what counts as “original scholarship” when we do it in sound. So, as we prepare our 2022 season of Phantom Power, we thought we'd share this discussion of how our sonic sausage gets made. And we'll be back next month with a new original episode! Things we talk about in this episode: Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control by Mack Hagood (Duke, 2019) “Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood (Real Life, December 3, 2020) “The Scholarly Podcast: Form and Function in Audio Academia” by Mack Hagood in Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt, Eds (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument? Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone. Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime soundtrips direct to your home headphones via the internet in their winter listening series. We are sure that Phantom Power listeners will love this experience. And right now, you can buy tickets for 25% off with the promo code phantompower25. (As a public university employee, I should probably note that I am not receiving financial compensation through this promo code. –Mack) In this episode, host Mack Hagood talks to Harnett and Hoff about why they grew frustrated with working in public radio and how they now assemble sonic experiences that don't impose a fixed narrative on their listeners. We also listen to some fantastic excerpts from their upcoming listening series. We also briefly discuss a sound art classic, I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier. You can hear Lucier perform the piece in this video from an MIT symposium in 2014. Shortly after our interview, Lucier passed away at the age of 90. May he Rest In Peace. Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Music by Graeme Gibson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

How to think about the contradictory figure of R. Murray Schafer? A renegade scholar who used sound technology to create an entirely new field of study, even as he devalued the very tools of its trade. A gifted composer who claimed a sincere appreciation for indigenous cultures, yet one who, perhaps, could only love them on his own terms, only as they fit into his sweeping vision for Canadian music. An erudite reader with a deep knowledge of world cultures, who nevertheless dismissed Canada's most multicultural areas as less than truly Canadian. And a man, who despite a bomb-throwing persona on the page, is described by those who knew him as a kind and generous person. Today we speak to Jonathan Sterne, Mitchell Akiyama, and Hildegard Westerkamp to learn the critiques and contradictions of Schafer. Perhaps the greatest testament to his lasting legacy is the fact that we aren't done arguing with him. Works discussed in this episode:  Jonathan Sterne's first book, The Audible Past, includes critiques of Schafer's work, especially his concept of schizophonia. His chapter “Soundscape, Landscape, Escape” (PDF, in the edited volume Soundscapes of the Urban Past) traces the intellectual and audiophile histories of Schafer's term soundscape.   Listen, a short film on Schafer directed by David New, includes Shafer's claim that recorded sounds are not “real sound.” Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Sound Walk presents a subtler way of thinking about “schizophonic” sounds. Her chapter “The Disruptive Nature of Listening: Today, Yesterday, Tomorrow” (in the edited volume Sound Media Ecology) reexamines the World Soundscape Project through the political lenses of the 1970s and today.   An episode of the CBC radio program “Soundscapes of Canada” is available at the Canadian Music Centre's music library.  Rafael de Oliveira, Patrícia Lima, and Alexsander Duarte‘s interview with Schafer in Corfu, Greece is available on YouTube.   Mitchell Akiyama's critique of the World Soundscape Project appears in “Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition” (on the sound studies blog Sounding Out) and in his chapter “Nothing Connects Us but Imagined Sound” (in the edited volume Sound, Music, Ecology).  The program notes (PDF) to Schafer's North/White contain his dismissal of urban Canadians (page 43). Dylan Robinson's book Hungry Listening opens with Schafer's insulting words about “Eskimo music” and contains a critique of the way Schafer appropriates indigenous music to create his “Canadian” music.   The Vancouver Chamber Choir shares this performance of Schafer's “Miniwanka” complete with a side scrolling presentation of the graphic score.  Today's music was by R. Murray Schafer, Vireo, and Blue the Fifth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918) (Duke University Press, 2024), Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and knowledge production. She foregrounds the archival presence of individual speakers and positions their recorded voices as responses to their experiences of colonialism, war, and the journey from Africa to Europe. By engaging with the recordings alongside written sources, photographs, and artworks depicting the speakers, Hoffmann personalizes speakers from present-day Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Congo. Knowing by Ear includes transcriptions of numerous recordings of spoken and sung texts, revealing acoustic archives as significant yet under-researched sources for recovering the historical speaking positions of colonized subjects and listen to the acoustic echo of colonial knowledge production. Anette Hoffmann received her Phd at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in 2005. From 2006 she has engaged with acoustic and audio-visual collections as part of the colonial archive. On the basis of her research and the practice of close listening in collaboration with translators and historians in/from Africa, she has developed an approach on sound recordings as alternative sources of colonial history and as a crucial part of histories of colonial knowledge production. Her engagement with sound archives has benefited immensely from working as a researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town (until 2014). Currently she is affiliated with the University of Cologne. Hoffmann is also an artist and a curator. Her exhibition What We See, which engaged with recordings from Namibia (1931) was first shown in the Slave Lodge in Cape Town in 2009 and was also shown in Namibia, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. A sound track based on the recording with Abdoulaye Niang was presented at the Theodore Monod Museum for African Art in Dakar, Senegal, in 2024. New work, based on silent movies from the Kalahari, on which she works with the video artist Jannik Franzen, engages with the companion species of German Colonialism in Namibia and will be shown in Vienna in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you're someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music–or you've just thrown around the word “soundscape”–you've probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada's most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. He brought a musician's ear to the field of ecology and he brought an ecological perspective to music. And he bequeathed us a generative vocabulary for talking about and thinking about sound.  This is the first of a two-part series on R. Murray Schafer. Next month, we speak with two of Schafer's critics–Mitchell Akiyama and Jonathan Sterne. But today, we speak with three of Schafer's associates to understand the person, his creative works, and his lasting impact on the study of sound: Ellen Waterman, ethnomusicologist, flutist, and Schafer expert Hildegard Westerkamp, soundscape composer and member of the World Soundscape Project Eric Leonardson, sound artist and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Creative works heard on today's show: Listen, a short film on Schafer, directed by David New. Snowforms, R. Murray Schafer The Greatest Show, R. Murray Schafer The Crown Of Ariadne, R. Murray Schafer Wolf Music V: Nocturne, R. Murray Schafer Le Testament, Ezra Pound Loving, R. Murray Schafer Beneath the Forest Floor, Hildegard Westerkamp Miniwanka, R. Murray Schafer   Special thanks to Elisabeth Hodges for translation assistance, Alex Blue V for our outtro music, and Craig Eley for his dramatic turn as R. Murray Schafer. Today's show was produced and edited by Mack Hagood with additional editing by Ravi Krishnaswami. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies