In a pioneering study that considers sound as only one dynamic part of a ‘thick event’ – an action that unfolds a wide range of sensory phenomena – rather than a fixed object of study (p. 1), Nina Sun Eidsheim lays the groundwork for experiencing ‘tactile, spatial, physical, material and vibrational sensations’ in vocal performances (p. 8). Her introduction confronts tendencies in musicology to prioritize the pitch, duration or timbre of musical notes over sensory and physical aspects of performances. These aesthetic labels of pitch, duration and timbre establish an abstract ‘figure of sound’ (p. 2, original emphasis) that effectively divorces the voice from the body by insisting on technical measures rather than bodily movements. Instead, Eidsheim explores other elements that affect the process of making or receiving sound, such as a singer's anatomy or the acoustics of a space. Informed by her training as a vocalist and teacher, Eidsheim studies vocal exchanges between bodies and environments that create multisensorial ‘thick events’.

In chapters 1 and 2, Eidsheim illuminates how performance practices have naturalized the narrower figure of sound through uncontested Western classical music standards of acoustical spaces and pedagogical practices. To analyse how performances can activate multiple sensations in listeners’ bodies, she discusses contemporary barrier-breaking works performed by vocalists Julia Snapper and Meredith Monk alongside their artistic biographies, critical reviews and her personal reactions. Eidsheim addresses the sensory exchanges between performer, composition and listener through three areas: materials (animate and inanimate) through which sounds are transmitted; spatio-temporal relations of acoustics; and, as detailed in chapter 3, expanded descriptions of sound beyond static signifiers such as language, pitch, timbre or cultural association.

Eidsheim engages multiple scholarly disciplines, including science, anthropology and various humanities. Her first chapter, on Julia Snapper's performances, exemplifies how this interdisciplinary focus contains significant implications for increased gender expression in opera. As Snapper sings underwater and upside down, she upends the constraining bodily regimens female vocalists undergo to precisely execute operatic techniques. In her refusal to conform with the pristine vocal control required by opera, Snapper ‘shatters the premise . . . of a stable, knowable sound’ (p. 50) that audiences have come to expect from the genre. Transmitting sounds through unusual mediums, such as water, Snapper uproots listeners from passive spectatorship to encounter ‘material forces over which the mind and body do not have control’ (p. 48). Eidsheim asserts the new possibilities that a singer creates for gendered and artistic representation when she engages the unique physicality of her vocal instrument – her entire body – to produce sound.

With pictures, diagrams and first-person accounts of performances, Eidsheim emphasizes bodily and environmental channels through which sound can vibrate to insist that music depends on these particular mechanisms. Through discussions of the lungs, cranial bones and limbs, she contextualizes how sound travels from performer to listener through specific material environments. In chapter 4, Eidsheim strongly applies her theories to pedagogical physical exercises that produce motion-based, rather than sound-based, vocal lines. She encourages students to consider sounds as ‘actions leading to singular, unrepeatable articulations’ unique to each body (p. 146). Citing Jackson Pollock's emphasis on the actions of painting rather than the marks left on the canvas, Eidsheim further highlights the synergetic bodily exchanges that occur between artists and listeners in performances.

Eidsheim's formulation of music as vibrational practice engenders new ways of considering communication between singer and audience, environment and body, and animate and inanimate materials. In doing so, Eidsheim's reframing of sounds as dynamically relational events engages political, cultural, racial, feminist and ecological currents in sound and music studies. Her work generates wide-ranging and pragmatic resonances for those interested in questions surrounding sound and multi-sensory experience.