Week 7: Reading/Listening Notes
1) Â Pettman, Dominic. "The Screech Within Speech." Sounding Out!. Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, 16 July 2015. Web.
-- âAnd yet, as we have seen, there is no simple hierarchy here, where the human occasionally â in times of great distress â finds themselves, by this logic, reduced to being âan animal.â We might call this the vox mundi â the voice of the worldâin which, like the shadowy depths of the ocean, there is a swath of sound shared by human and animal. The creaturely voice can be sweet, like the nightingale. Or it can be harsh, like the traumatized cockatoo or the green-eyed professor-clown. â
2)Â Mapchan, Deborah. "Body." Keywords in Sound. Ed. David Novack and Matt Sakakeeny. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. 33-42. Print.
--âIf the twentieth-century legal body was defined largely by its effectsâwhat it performed in the world, whether intentionally or unintentionally (rights, sovereignty, ownership)âthe body in the twenty-first century is a body defined by its affects, its materialities of feelingâ (39).Â
3) Is there a way to understand the affective impact of animals on humans? Are all non-human noises considered affect?
4) I see a connection between the relationship Mapchan described in her âBodyâ essay and the techniques of ASMR I watched last week. A deep form of listening that not only involves the ears but becomes a visceral response to sound, the vibrations of devotion that lead to higher planes of consciousness in a Sufi context could possibly be connected to the physical relaxing sensations when can experience in ASMR. There is an Interconnection through sound waves produced by the âlistenerâ (Sufi singer)  and what Mapchan describes as the âsound body.â The sound body cannot be owned, codified, captured. In reading Mapchanâs theorization of the sound body in a secular world, how world and sound body are interdependent and changing constantly, I couldnât help but notice, as a practicing Buddhist, that there were traces of non-attachment/non-possession and self-ing in her theory that are also present in Buddhist spirituality and teachings.
