Geosonics: Listening to the Mediated Soundscape

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

How do we listen to the earth That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Listening to the Mediated Soundscape. Through sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Josh Dittrich explores who is considered "we" and what is the "earth," as well what counts as sound and the climate implications at play when mediating the environment. In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site or a simple surrounding: environment is immanently implicated in the chains of mediation that make up the material and imaginative infrastructure of our lives. The analytical task of Geosonics is to tune into that infrastructure through sound. Drawing on influential work in sound studies around the concept of transduction, this book explores how listening does not take place in a pre-existing soundscape, but rather makes place by etching out a mediated, mutually constitutive set of relations between listener, instrument, object and environment.

Author Bio

Josh Dittrich is a lecturer in the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information & Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada, where he teaches courses in communications; writing; and cultural studies in media and sound. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University, USA, and a PhD in Communication & Culture from York University, Canada. Dittrich's work has appeared in journals such as Aesthetics & Culture; New German Critique; Culture, Theory & Critique; and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media & Culture; as well as the edited volume Utopia: The Avant-garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, part of the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Series.