What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past. Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound—music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio—is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity. Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made—the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice—how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs." Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age," Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it--and to have listened through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry examines the dual-edged nature of sound--its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma--within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient themselves within the fog of war.

Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever you like? This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars, making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you to peep behind the scenes of international standardization committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads, and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.

In 1996, Jesuit activist John Dear spent several weeks on silent retreat in Thomas Merton's hermitage on the grounds of the Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. His journal from those days of silence and solitude invites us into Merton's own spirit of peace. The Sound of Listening takes us into both the journey of John Dear and Thomas Merton, and our own journey to peace and new life. As we enter these days of peace, we pray with John Dear the peace prayer of St. Francis and join our voice to his Updated Version of the Apostles' Creed. Together, we emerge ready for the struggle for justice, renewed for the journey of nonviolence, and enlightened to speak the good news of peace to a wartorn world.

Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.

Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, meditators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment . Deep Listening(R) is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats. Oliveros is recognized as a pioneer in electronic music and a leader in contemporary music as composer, performer, educator and author. Her works are performed internationally and her improvisational performances are documented extensively on recordings, in the literature and on the worldwide web.