Throughout these last weeks of getting together with friends during the holidays, the MLA convention in Vancouver, and working out the initial stages of an extensive archival project concerning Canadian poetry recordings (of which I’ll be posting news here soon), it seems I’ve been in an ongoing dialogue about sound. One thing that has come up in all of these dialogues with friends and colleagues is what books are we reading, what’s good, and why. As I keep promising, and then promptly forgetting, to send people the names of books, I thought I’d simply post them here. Below is a list of the books and articles I’ve read over the last 16 months or so that are related to sound studies – many of which I’ve read in preparation for comprehensive exams on phonopoetics (with Jason Camlot) and sound studies (with Jonathan Sterne). I’ve no doubt missed a few, but plan to continue to add to this list in the time ahead in the hopes that it might be a useful resource to others.

–Michael Nardone

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Adorno, Theodor. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” October 55 (1990): 56-61.

Adorno, Theodor. Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Adorno, Theodor. Essays on Music. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Want, 1977.

Baus, Eric. “Granular Vocabularies: Poetics & Recorded Sound.” Lecture, Naropa University, 22 July 2013. Web.

Benjamin, Walter. Radio Benjamin. Trans. Jonathan Lutes. London: Verso, 2014.

Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Bernstein, Charles. “Making Audio Visible: The Lessons of Visual Language for the Textualization of Sound.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, (16), 2006, 277-89.

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

Casillas, Dolores Inés. Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy. New York: NYU Press, 2014.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Connor, Stephen. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Davidson, Michael. “‘By ear, he sd’: Audio-Tapes and Contemporary Criticism.” Credences 1.1 (1981): 105-120.

Davidson, Michael. “Technologies of Presence: Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics.” Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 196-224.

Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. “The Voice that Keeps Silent.” Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Dworkin, Craig. A Handbook of Protocols for Literary Listening. New York. Arika/Whitney, 2012.

Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Eichhorn, Kate. “Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound.” Mosaic 42.1 (2009) 183-198.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening.” Senses & Society 6:2 (2011). 133-155.

Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010.

Evans, Steve. “The Phonotextual Braid.” Jacket2, 25 March 2012.

Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Gopinath, Sumanth. The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2013.

Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010.

Grubbs, David. Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Kahn, Douglas and Gregory Whitehead (editors). The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.

Kahn, Douglas. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Keil, Charles and Steven Feld. Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kreilkamp, Ivan. “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness.” Victorian Studies 40.2 (1997): 211-244.

Mackey, Nathaniel. “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol.” Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Mattern, Shannon. “Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place.” Space and Culture 14.1 (2011): 27-50.

Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Migone, Christoff. Sonic Somatic: Performancs of the Unsound Body. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012.

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersion into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011.

Novak, David. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Ochoa, Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening & Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin, ed. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Rodgers, Tara. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech.

Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noise. Trans. Robert Filliou. Read on UbuWeb.

Schaeffer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994.

Schlichter, Annette. “Critical Madness, Enunciative Excess: The Figure of the Madwoman in Postmodern Feminist Texts.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 3:3 (2003). 308-330.

Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011.

Severin, Laura. Poetry Off the Page: 20^th Century British Women Poets in Performance. London: Ashgate, 2004.

Smith, Jacob. Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Sterne, Jonathan, ed. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Sterne, Jonathan. Various essays collected on his personal site: http://sterneworks.org/text/.

Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Taylor, Timothy D., Mark Katz, Tony Grajeda, eds. Music, Sound and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema and Radio. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Weiss, Allen S. Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 

Weiss, Allen S. Experimental Sound and Radio. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000. 

Weiss, Allen S. Phantasmatic Radio. Durham, Duke University Press, 1995.

Vazquez, Alexandra T. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Vocler, Juliette. Extremely Loud: Sound as a Weapon. Trans. Carol Volk. New York: The New Press, 2013.

Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum Press, 2010.

Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.