Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition: Hearing the Continuum of Sound

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

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From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salom Voegelin expands possible world theory to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelins exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by ine ODwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.

Reviews

Salom Voegelin is a brilliant and subtle thinker about sound and music, so Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, Revised Edition is a deeply explored and essential study of the necessity of listening, of openly absorbing what sound tells us of our shared world, listening which gives us access to the fluid nature of relationships and connections, to the interactive web of the world and our participation in it through awareness of this 'complex continuity' and of ourselves inextricably enmeshed within it. Salom Voegelin generously maps many ways of practicing listening to sonic worlds and of sharing access to the ever-expanding possible world of sound-life, then goes further, leaping beyond our physical and conceptual limits, diving into sound we cannot hear but which affects us, becoming part of our apprehensible world and of our learning how to live within it. * Annea Lockwood, Composer and Professor Emeritus, Vassar College, USA *
The first edition of this book opened up new ways of thinking about sound and listening, which seemed provocative at the time, engaging with possible world theory, speculating on what and how sound means without referring it to the visual, and proposing a continuum of hearing between sound art and music. In this highly anticipated and essential new edition, Voegelin thinks about bodies and presents with rigor and extraordinary clarity the way sound may open us up to the plural possibility of bodily existence. Effortlessly interlacing phenomenology, feminist and queer theories, and weaving together sound thought and practice, while remaining precise yet accessible, the author invites us to listen to our own and each others bodies, enjoy their transforming, hybrid and even monstrous capacities, and discover the emancipatory force of their soundings. * Mikhail Karikis, film director and Professor, MIMA School of Art & Design, Teesside University, UK *

Author Bio

Salom Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, UK. An artist and writer, she is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (Bloomsbury, 2010) and The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2018).