Sounds Senses

Sounds Sensesis about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.

Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, even though it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the spheres. Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities. This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction: Leaning In -- 1 Sound Studies Today: Where Are We Going? -- PART I Sound and Voice -- 2 "The World Wanderings of a Voice": Exhibiting the Cylinder Phonograph in Australasia -- 3 "Are You Sitting Comfortably?": The Changing Position of Storytellers on Early Australian Radio -- 4 Lindbergh's Voice -- 5 Noisy Classrooms and the "Quiet Corner": The Modern School, Sound and the Senses -- PART II Sound and Violence -- 6 Throwing Down the Gauntlet: Voice, Power and Sexual Violence in Penal New South Wales -- 7 Startling Reports: Gunfire as Social Soundscape in Early Colonial Australia -- 8 Sounds and Silence of War: Dresden and Paris during World War II -- 9 Hearing the 1965-66 Indonesian Anti-Communist Repression: Sensory History and Its Possibilities -- 10 "For a Few Seconds, Imagine": An Aural Experience of Six Days of Terror at the Stadium of Chile, 12-17 September 1973 -- PART III Sensory Memories -- 11 "Big Smoke Stacks": Competing Memories of the Sounds and Smells of Industrial Heritage -- 12 Intimate Strangers: Multisensorial Memories of Working in the Home -- 13 Botanical Memory: Materiality, Affect and Western Australian Plant Life -- 14 "If I Ever Hear It, It Takes Me Straight Back There": Music, Autobiographical Memory, Space and Place -- 15 Seeing in Black and White: Visualizing "Shadow Sisters" among Metaphors of Light and Dark -- Contributors -- Index

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times

Did you know that you don't remember all the sounds you hear in a day? Your brain lets you know what sounds are important to pay attention to. Students will discover how their ears allow them to hear loud noises, whispers, music, and many other sounds.