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The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer's poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. This warm meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure waiting when we learn that the world is alive with sound.
The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer's poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. This warm meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure waiting when we learn that the world is alive with sound.
Prelude
Sound and Knowledge
The Audiable: An Introduction
Some Leitmotifs
The Standard of Vision
A Philosophy of Listening?
Constructive Description
Sight, Sound, and Language
The Sound of Words
Seeing, Saying, and Hearing
The Audiable: Variations on a Theme
Music in the Air
“No Sound without Music”
Language and the Human
Lord Bacon’s Echoes
Ripple Effects: Distant Voices
The Infinite Broadcast
Immanence
Reading Transfigured: St. Augustine
To the Life: The Image
Moving Pictures
Modern Times: The Cartoon
The Sound of Meaning
Music and the Audiable: A Suite in Three Movements
Plato’s Singing School
Musical Synesthesia
The Music of Language
The Soundscape
Song
Noise and Silence
Fish, Flesh, or Fowl
Sensory Hybrids
“Waiting to Be the Music”
Circle Songs
Forty-Part Motets
The Ether
Elemental Media
Elemental Fluids
Writing the Soundscape
Haunting Melodies
The Lifelike: The Undead
Beyond Words? 1
The Audiable and the Audible
Into Silence
Enchantments of the Name
The Inaudible
On Saying “I am”
The Shriek
Metal
Here Comes That Song Again
The Mirror of Silence
Rhythmic Hearing
Media All the Way Down
The Auditory Window
Cacophony: Dispossession (Beckett)
Euphony: Repossession (Beckett)
Worldly Dissonance
Sounds of Battle: The Civil War
Sounds of Battle: World War I
Ulysses in Auschwitz
Intermezzo
Sounding Bodies
Pandemonium?
Songs of Entropy
By Hand
Past and Present
Consciousness
Acknowledgments
Index
Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and
Music at Fordham University, is an award-winning composer and the
author of fifteen previous books, most of them with University of
California Press, including The Thought of Music, winner of the
2017 ASACP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music
Criticism.
"Summing Up: Recommended."
*CHOICE*
An Alex Ross "Bookshelf" recommendation
*The Rest is Noise*
"The Hum of the World is a more-than-intriguing read and definitely
one that will get you thinking about the role of sound within a
cosmic context. . . . Recommended."
*Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians*
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