Through an analysis of four contemporary operas, Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions of how we think about sound, music, and listening by challenging common assumptions about sound, freeing it from a constraining set of fixed concepts and meanings.
Nina Sun Eidsheim is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Table of Contents
Illustrations viii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Music's Material Dependency: What Underwater Opera Can Tell Us about Odysseus's Ears 27 2. The Acoustic Mediation of Voice, Self, and Others 58 3. Music as Action: Singing Happens before Sound 95 4. All Voice, All Ears: From the Figure of Sound to the Practice of Music 132 5. Music as a Vibrational Practice: Singing and Listening as Everything and Nothing 154 Notes 187 Bibliography 241 Index 261
What People are Saying About This
Suzanne G. Cusick
"Imaginative, bold, theoretically wide-ranging and rooted in readings of contemporary culture, Sensing Sound proposes a radical, genuinely original rethinking of human beings' acoustical behavior and experience."
MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Jonathan Sterne
"Sensing Sound offers a singular and original perspective on the status of the voice and the theory of music. Nina Sun Eidsheim teaches readers to think about voice as a multisensory phenomenon and, in so doing, turns the tools of sound studies and critical musicology against themselves, demonstrating conclusively that an understanding of sound is not enough for understanding voice, singing, or music."
