Geosonics: Listening Through Earth's Soundscapes

by Joshua Dittrich

2024 · Bloomsbury · 208 pages

Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Joshua Dittrich explores the material and metaphorical geology of the sonic environment. In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site, or 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 listeners, media, and environments. [Text Source: Bloomsbury]

“How do we listen to the earth?”

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. From Geosonics to Geosonicks
2. The Sound Beneath Our Feet: Earthquakes and Ear Quakes
3. A Planet Made of Beethoven: Audio-Stretching, Transductive Listening and 24/7 Aesthetics
4. Now You See It… : Hearing Colors and Picturing Soundscapes
5. Sound Asleep: Sleeping, Listening, and the Politics of Nonconscious Experience
6. Listening from Outer Space: Sun Ra's Reverberant Geology
Afterword
Bibliography
Notes
Index