Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise by Michel Chion, and: Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice by Nina Sun Eidsheim (review)

Since the publication of Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003), the field of sound studies has increasingly foregrounded the materiality of sound. Vivified by cultural histories, ethnographies, and aesthetic critique, among other approaches, this multifaceted field focuses on sound in part to destabilize and complicate the visual episteme of Enlightenment culture. Scholars frame sonic phenomena as a vital dimension of sensory studies in order to revise the “history of the senses,” and to offer new ways of knowing and perceiving lifeworlds in ways that both integrate and challenge our understanding of aurality. The two books addressed in this review are a major step forward in this direction. Both pivot around listening as a sensory mode of perception that shapes the experience and objecthood of sound. Though they take strikingly different approaches to listening, each of these studies presents sonic ways of being-int-he-world that set forth a rich and complex terrain for future efforts in theorizing embodiment and selfhood. While performance studies has historically tended to focus on orality, movement, and related embodied modalities of self-presentation, less attention has been dedicated to the role of aurality, listening, and hearing in shaping relations between self and society. These books engage with sonic phenomena in ways that will undoubtedly enrich the field’s debates about aesthetic praxis and embodied communicative processes.

Michel Chion is highly regarded for his lifelong work in film studies, in particular, his argument that the cinematic experience depends more on the effects of audio perception than visual media. In Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, he generally does not rehearse this debate (though he does gesture to his extensive work on cinema), but presses onward to cover the sweeping plateaus of sound. Originally published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and translated into English by James A. Steintrager in 2016, this set of intertextual essays is a broad exploration of what is constituted by and through the perception of acoustic phenomena. Chion pushes back against “general” and “abstract” qualities of sound, instead recognizing that sonic experiences are at once partial and paradoxical. Sound, he declares, is “often associated with something lost—with something that fails at the same time that it is captured, and yet is always there” (3). Organized into five parts, each of which is comprised of several thematic essays, Chion takes readers on a journey in which he explores multitudinous frameworks for theorizing sound before settling on that which informed his work from the beginning of his career: tutelage under Pierre Schaeffer, musique concrète, and acousmatics. What informs his broad musings about sound—and its translation into verse, drama, cinematic design, and music—is praxis. An established composer of musique concrète, the forerunner of electronic music and contemporary composition, Chion’s forays into film were informed by his work as a recordist and composer. Chion also brings his lifelong experience as a pedagogue to bear on Sound.

This work is at heart an effort to map out “acoulogy” as a domain of auditory experience that accounts for listening and listeners. The first four parts of his opus rehearse debates in literary theory, (post)structural linguistic theory, and film theory to carve a space for acoulogy that relates to but is distinct from these fields. More specifically, in both chapters one and four, Chion traces the use of sound in language from prelinguistic infancy to the acquisition of language, a process that he disparages as the “scotomization of the voice” which “transforms how the subject hears himself” (15). Here, he identifies a gap between what we perceive as verbal linguistic idioms that communicate semantic meaning, and embodied sounds...