Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq

by J. Martin Daughtry

Overview

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it—and to have listened through it.

Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry examines the dual-edged nature of sound—its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma—within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient themselves within the fog of war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190887834
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

J. Martin Daughtry is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and sound studies at New York University. His work centers on acoustic violence; voice; listening; sound studies; the Iraq war, and musics of the Russian-speaking world. Daughtry is co-editor, with Jonathan Ritter, of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge 2007), and has published essays in Social Text, Ethnomusicology, Music and Politics, Russian Literature, Poetics Today, and a number of edited collections.

Table of Contents

Dedication
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: Composing Thoughts on Sound and Violence
-In Lieu of an Epigraph: Sound-centered Memories of Operation Iraqi Freedom
-The Belliphonic
-Intellectual Predecessors
-A Necessary Detour
-Approaches and Challenges

Fragment #1: The Presence of Mind to Save an Ear: Ali's Story

Section I: Sonic Matériel
Chapter 1: Belliphonic Sounds and Indoctrinated Ears: The Elements of Wartime Audition
-Charting the Belliphonic
-Listening, Structure, and Positionality
-Vehicular Sounds
-Communications
-Civilian Sounds
-Weapons

Chapter 2: Mapping Zones of Wartime (In)audition
-The Zone of the Audible Inaudible
-The Narrational Zone
-The Tactical Zone
-The Trauma Zone
-A Complicating Factor: Iraqi Civilian Auditors
-Another Complicating Factor: Sound and Psychological Trauma
-Conclusion

Fragment #2: Stealth and Improvisation in the Desert: Jason's Story

Fragment #3: Loudly Searching in the Resonant Darkness: The Anatomy of a Nighttime House Raid

Section II: Structures of Listening, Sounding, and Emplacement
Introduction to section II
Chapter 3: Auditory Regimes
-Ideals of Military Audition
-National Audition
-Oblique Indoctrination of Belliphonic Ears
-Situational Awareness
-The Inclusive Auditory Regime of Iraqi Civilians
-Auditory Literacy, Competence, Virtuosity
-Incommensurability

Chapter 4: Sonic Campaigns
-Sound (and Violence)
-Violence (and Sound)
-The Omnidirectionality of Sound and Violence
-Sonic Campaigns

Chapter 5: Acoustic Territories
-Emplacement, Displacement, Transplacement
-Sound and Territoriality
-The Virtual Acoustic Territory of Recorded Sound
-The Radiant Acoustic Territories of Wartime
-The Resonant Acoustic Territories of Baghdad
-The Resonant Acoustic Territory of the body
-Life at the Intersection of Regime, Campaign and Territory

Fragment #4: Fatal Mishearing

Section III: Music, Mediation, and Survival
Chapter 6: Mobile Music in the Military
-Introducing the Wartime iPod
-A Century of Recorded Music on the Battlefield
-iPods in the Iraq War
-Amping Up, Staying Focused, Cooling Down: Technologies of Self-regulation in Combat
-Moving Bodies, Loosening Tongues, Adjusting Crosshairs: Technologies for Manipulating Others in Combat
-Concluding Thoughts

Fragment #5: From "Hell's Bells" to "Silent Night": A Conversation about Music in the Military

Fragment #6: Keeping the Music Turned Down Low: Shymaa's Story

Chapter 7: A Time of Troubles for Iraqi Music
-Iraq's Musical Legacy
-Post-invasion Challenges
-Political Violence
-Sectarian Violence
-U.S. Forces Targeting Music
-The Attenuated Acoustic Territory of Iraqi Musical Practice

Conclusion: The Amplitude of Violence
Fragment #7: Listening as Poiesis: Tareq's Story
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"To say that Listening to War is ground-breaking, penetrating, and vitally important doesn't begin to convey the affective and intellectual impact of engaging with this work. More than challenging music and sound apprehension and scholarship, the book offers painful, visceral access to the ways in which ears suffer, bodies suffer, places suffer in wartime. There is no escape into abstraction or aestheticization here. It's shattering, from the very beginning..." — Norie Neumark, University of Melbourne, Journal of Sonic Studies

"This book is profound and urgently important. It is literally a study of war, not its outcomes. Daughtry expands ethnomusicologists' most basic assumptions, stepping sideways from music to the moment when sound creates and obliterates the self. He parses the inhabited, diachronic moment of sonic violence in a way I wouldn't have thought critically possible. Listening to War is stunningly smart, informed, and original. Virtually every sentence made me pause. Daughtry shows how ethnomusicology can-and should-address the most pressing issues of our time."—Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside

"Although the sounds of war are often recounted in art and scholarship, Listening to War is the first book I know of that helps us to really understand them. J. Martin Daughtry uses the anthropology of sound and hearing to offer a profound investigation of the experience of being close to violence-both of people physically proximate to violence and people unable to extricate themselves from it, either during wartime or afterward. This is a rare scholarly book: gripping, haunting, troubling and deeply edifying. I could not put it down."—Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

"More than any other ethnomusicologist over the last decade, J. Martin Daughtry has challenged and deeply reconfigured my understanding of sound, and that's not trivial considering that I taught a course called "Sound" for many years. In this book he performs an extraordinary trick: he has taken the web of sonic violence that surrounds all in a theatre of war and he has extended the intimate and visceral experience of its power and its horror to his readers. Daughtry has immersed us in the most important work of sound studies in many years."—Gage Averill, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia

"I have not read a more thorough case study of military conflict and sound, one that is so scrupulously documented, with its own implications and methodologies so fully explored. If, in fact, this study is exhaustive, what is the next step in research? The monograph gestures toward some answers. For example, the discussion of acoustic territories (p. 189 and elsewhere) is a further reminder of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and the physical environment, and fortifies the argument that the study of sonic experience provides the most promising platform for the further development of studies in cognitive theory. Apart from its own awe-inspiring comprehensiveness, the book provides a foundation for continued exploration of such emergent fields as cognitive ecology, extended mind theory, and the relationship between gesture and cognition." — American Musicological Society

From the Publisher