Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies

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Acknowledgments

This essay is an outcome of a workshop on the topic of “Sound Studies and Rhetoric” at the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, created at the behest of Ph.D. candidate and workshop participant Jon Stone, held in Lawrence, Kansas, last June. The authors thank Jon for his advice and keen insights, as well as workshop “sounders”: Katie Fargo Ahern, Gina L. Ercolini, Lisa Foster, Andrew Hansen, Jamie Landau, Martin Law, Amy Patterson, and Anne Shea. This essay is better read as a “report” collaboratively authored by the workshoppers.

Notes

¹There are, of course, a number of exceptions among rhetoricians interested in poststructuralism, affect studies, and object-oriented ontology. See Diane Davis.

²Although Bull and Back do not reference him, Theodor W. Adorno was the first to describe “anyone in the habit of thinking with his ears” (Prisms 19).

³Unquestionably, there is a jockeying with this emerging field to avoid the trap of disciplinarity itself: “Defining a field is tricky,” notes Sterne, “and too often gets overtaken by contests for academic authority” (Sound 10).

⁴See, for example, Lawrence Grossberg's recent Cultural Studies in the Future Tense for an intense argument in favor of “conjunctural analysis.”

⁵While The Audible Past continues to generate excitement in the field, Sterne has made another useful contribution to sound studies in his recent book MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012). It is unapologetically materialist and as such presents an exemplar for research and structure for those scholars taking this approach to sound. Sterne examines how sound has been stored and archived over the past century, and pairs this history with an examination of technology and scientific theories about sound. The analogy that Sterne makes is to ergonomics—if it feels right, it makes workers more productive and consumers more willing to purchase. If it sounds right, the same rewards are reaped.

⁶We would be remiss, however, not to mention that a number of influential, psychoanalytically inflected studies have marked a sustained interest in the voice over the twentieth century in the theoretical humanities, particularly among feminist scholars. See, for example, Kaja Silverman and Julia Kristeva. For a review of this and related current literature, see Joshua Gunn.

⁷The most notable sound theorist from the Marxian tradition in the theoretical humanities is Adorno. During his career he published, among others, Composing for the Films (1947), Philosophy of New Music (1949); Sound Figures (1959); Mahler: A Musical Physiognamy (1960); Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962); and Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (1963). Many of his shorter essays and fragments on sound have been collected into Essays on Music (2002) and a massive but incomplete study, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (2009). Adorno was comfortable bridging Marxian materialism with phenomenological and psychological interpretations of sound, his lengthy essay “Radio Physiognomics” and book on Mahler being two such examples. Because of his mixed methods (materialist and psychological) and his propensity for curmudgeonly attacks on modern popular music (swing jazz in particular), the scholarly shadow he casts is wider than it is deep. Richard Leppert's lengthy but masterful introduction to Essays on Music, which he also edited, goes a long way toward deepening our understanding of Adorno's profound contributions to sound studies.

⁸At this juncture in a review essay on sound studies and rhetoric written by others, one might expect to encounter the observation that Rickert's largely theoretically minded study is complemented by Greg Goodale's Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (2011), which leans more heavily on historical accounts of the evolving, modern soundscape coupled with a number of concrete examples and sustained critical readings. We do so here only in the notes and pass over evaluation because one of us is its author.

⁹ Einstürzende Neubauten: Liebeslieder, dir. Klaus Maeck and Johanna Schenkel, Studio K7, 2005.

¹⁰The double entendre “sound evidence” was coined by Lisa Foster, during the “Rhetoric and Sound Studies Workshop” at the Rhetorical Studies of America Summer Institute in June, 2013, which she used to describe the challenges of writing about popular music in scholarship.

¹¹And unlike decades past, we can now point readers to a YouTube audio file of the speech to better make our point; just listen to this, y'all!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0PW1Jhuu2Q.