New Books in Sound Studies

Mar 07 2025 146 ep. 52 mins 1.1k
New Books in Sound Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of sound about their new books.

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  Society & Culture
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Eric Dienstfrey, "Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology" (U California Press, 2024)

Mar 07 2025 78 mins  
Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology (University of California Press, 2024) reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, a

Sonic AI

Mar 03 2025 37 mins  
Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how har

Tiziano Manca, "Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music" (Transcript Verlag, 2023)

Feb 28 2025 23 mins  
In Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music (Transcript Verlag, 2023), composer Tiziano Manca investigates the premises for and consequences of a major change in his compositional practice: this change emphasizes the temporality of sound and, more recently, the relationship between sounding body and musician. It calls into question the traditional conception o

Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes

Feb 24 2025 48 mins  
Brian Harnetty’s recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty’s musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard. In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Bria

The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman

Feb 17 2025 45 mins  
Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusi

Hildegard Westerkamp: A Life in Soundscape Composition

Feb 10 2025 44 mins  
Today we speak to Hildegard Westerkamp, the pioneering composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. The centerpiece of all of her work is a close attention to the sonic environment and its relation to culture. We will listen to excerpts of six soundscape compositions made between 1975 and 2005, all of which reward the close listener–conceptually and aesthetically–with a deeper r

Carola Lorea and Rosalind Hackett, "Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Feb 09 2025 48 mins  
What makes sounds “religious”? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history

Spacing Out with Dallas Taylor of 20,000 HZ

Jan 27 2025 49 mins  
Today we talk to Dallas Taylor, host of the most popular sound podcast on the planet, Twenty Thousand Hertz. I like to think our show sounds pretty good, but Twenty Thousand Hertz is next-level audio production, some of the very best in the podcasting business. And Dallas prides himself on making a podcast for absolutely everyone. As he told me, he tries to make a show that’s jus

Listening in the Afterlife of Data

Jan 20 2025 81 mins  
If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experim

(Re)Making Radio with the Shortwave Collective

Jan 13 2025 56 mins  
The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public educatio