Many years ago, I was walking in downtown Hamilton with a friend. As often happens in downtown Hamilton, a woman we walked by asked us for spare change. I no longer remember exactly how the interaction played out – then as now, I often give change if I have it, but not always (particularly after …
Working on a book in 2020 has been quite a ride. I mean, I can’t complain too much – the horrors of the world have at points made it hard to generate the focus that writing requires, but I’ve managed. And I have, long after I had hoped, a draft of what is provisionally Chapter …
Sound studies. Indigenous sound studies, to be precise, by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. The centre of the work is consideration, through very close and careful attention to a range of works and performances, of the various ways in which settler art music and Indigenous music get put in relation and taken up. That might seem …
A book concerned with “positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles,” that attempts to seek out “ethical and agentive positions or tactics” grounded in “experiences we have of listening and being heard” (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of sound studies and a range of other theoretical resources, …
A scholarly history of the social and cultural origins of sound reproduction. Very much not an effort to tell a straightforward, linear story about the history of telegraphy, telephony, broadcasting, and recording, but rather draws selectively and nonlinearly from the decades before such tech was introduced and the early decades after to push readers to …
A scholarly examination of “told-to” narratives in the Canadian context, with some longer-ago history but mostly between the 1970s and 1990s. The told-to narrative is an old form that is of particular relevance to colonial contexts, in which white settler scholars and writers have produced written texts from oral stories told to them by Indigienous …
An odd little book. My reason for reading it was not terribly well aligned with its own purpose, so my relative indifference to it should not be taken too seriously. The author is an experimental composer, seemingly fairly well known in her particular niche, who has spent a lifetime thinking about listening. I heard about …
Feminist philosophy translated from Italian. Since ancient Greece, philosophy in the West has been predominantly centred on thought and on the visual, the semantic, the disembodied, the Said, and the reified. Cavarero begins from the observation that, when we speak, prior to whatever content is conveyed by our words, the singular character of the speaker’s …