The distinctive contribution of this essay collection on music, sound and space does not lie in its subject matter – which has a long pedigree – but rather in its innovative approach and consistency in treating sonic, social and spatial phenomena together. The significance of these separate but interrelated modalities of auditory experiences maps onto the potential for fostering a productive dialogue between hitherto discrete fields of inquiry, one of the key objectives of this book (p. 5). That, in itself, is a major step forward.
As Georgina Born states in the introductory chapter, the contributors seek to ‘augur a new kind of social phenomenology of music and sound’ (p. 7). While Born traces important antecedents in the pioneering work of Steven Feld and others, she nevertheless recognises the need to enrich a phenomenological framework by addressing – via Lefebvre – salient questions encompassing power relations in their historical and institutional forms. In other words, attention is required not only to the interface between sound and subject embedded in an acoustic environment, but to the musicalisation of space: that is, to how sonic practices reflect but also produce, configure and transfigure socio-spatial relations.
Central to this is an ongoing tension between notions of public and private space. Although contributors to this volume eschew any simplistic binary conception of public versus private, Born highlights the significance of maintaining an analytical distinction between the two, as well as underscoring the emphatically relational nature of music and sound's public-making or privatising capacities. This relationality, according to Born, can be traced back to a post-formalist stance exemplified by certain strands of sound art and computer music, and specifically by the ethico-political and social dimensions inherent in such movements (see also Ouzounian's chapter). It is this ‘exteriority’, therefore, that is of interest here, which stands in stark contrast with formalist notions of space that privilege musical form or sound objects.
The relatively under-theorised social dimension of sonic-spatial continua and their generative propensities calls attention to the ways in which music and sound mediate sociality across different but overlapping registers. Yet the social begins with the shifting figure of the ‘ensounded liberal subject’ (p. 42) and the porous boundaries between self and society – a relationship that is continually moulded on the basis of sonic-musical training and bodily affect. This point should not be taken lightly: in essence, it is the theme of the sonic imposition or eradication of spatial boundaries that pervades the diverse arguments on offer. For example, as Nicholas Cook puts it in relation to the spatial politics of classical music, it is the ‘consubstantiation of sound and space’ (p. 225) that affords sound its capacity to police boundaries. This is also dramatically highlighted in accounts that grapple with the delicate balance between subjectivation and subjection: between sound's creative force and its dystopian and destructive uses for the annihilation of subjectivity.
Thus, Tia DeNora's ethnographic exposition of what she calls ‘the therapeutic crafting of self through music’ (p. 274) is diametrically opposed to Cusick's chapter on the sonic destruction of the subject. While DeNora suggests, following Goffman, that we should treat music-making activities as fleeting ‘asylums’, Cusick urges us to listen to the sheer power of sound imposing an acoustemology that devastates one's body and sense of self. DeNora describes mental health clients participating in music therapy sessions; Cusick analyses prison detainees’ first-hand experiences of the brutal soundscapes employed by US interrogation authorities, in the context of their ‘global war on terror’. The sonic transcendence of bodily boundaries (as well as the complete lack thereof), is also encapsulated by what Tom Rice terms as ‘a cacophony of illness’ (p. 169) that characterises hospital soundscapes. For Rice, sound can violate the body and complicate its boundaries by abolishing the subject's privacy.
Rice's compelling account stresses the sonic configuration of bodily space. This observation draws on sound's potential not only to define space but also to become space: as Clarke demonstrates, there are various kinds of physically absent space that people hear in music, what he calls ‘virtual space’ (p. 95). For Sterne, however, who focuses on MPEG's listening tests, what matters is what people do not hear, and the ways in which their listening experience is ‘modulated’ by contextual and technological specificities, and vice versa. Indeed, this process can be reflected in the concept of mutual ‘tuning’, which Gopinath and Stanyek employ in their chapter to describe the ‘prosumption’ practices associated with a particular example of a portable listening device. Such tuning necessitates the control of bodily autonomic functions, but further points to the apparently parallel trajectories and harmonious relationship between subjective desires and capitalist interests.
Perhaps the most striking but ambiguous example of this is to be found in Dibben and Haake's account of office workers’ listening habits. While the practice of music-listening initially seems to involve the ‘nesting’ of private space within the workplace, one could argue the reverse: that by blurring the distinction between work and leisure, such practice culminates in the ‘colonisation of the private individual by the public world of work’ (p. 165). This liminal quality of sonically produced spaces forms the core of two further chapters in the collection by Eisenberg and Dueck, dealing respectively with Canadian aboriginal sociability and the ontological contestation of public space in Mombasa, Kenya. Dueck construes aboriginal music venues as ‘interstitial zones’, where cultural imagination and intimacy coexist in the articulation of aboriginal subjectivity. Eisenberg, on the other hand, draws on Feld's acoustemology and the ethics of listening in order to foreground an ‘ontological politics’ of space: the diverse and often conflicting nature of our knowledge about space, but also the tactical application of such knowledge. While Eisenberg describes the struggle for the ‘sonorous production of Islamic communitarian privacy’ in public spaces (p. 201), Philip Bohlman traces the historical unfolding of a teleological process in Europe, whereby Enlightenment ideas have resulted in the musical transformation of sacred private spaces into public performances.
In the final chapter, Richard Middleton examines the phonograph's place in the process of making public our innermost thoughts and feelings. In doing so, he embraces Nancy's notion of ‘being-with’, and argues for an ‘ethics of love’, which requires an ongoing feedback between self and ‘other’. If this ‘being-with’, exemplified by the phonographic medium, can have any resonance outside our academic analyses or music-listening habits, and if, as Ouzounian puts it, our writings (or music) should move ‘from poetic to critical concerns’ (p. 89), then the first step would be to abolish the boundaries between academic and sonic practice, as Georgina Born suggests, in our consideration of the socio-spatial dimensions of music and sound.
