Just Vibrations
The Purpose of Sounding Good
An urgently needed look at the ethical stakes of contemporary musical life and musical scholarship
Description
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility.
Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.
William Cheng teaches music, media, and ethics at Dartmouth College and is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination.
News, Reviews, Interviews
Read: Just Vibrations featured in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Link) | 3/16/2016 Read: Just Vibrations listed in Times Higher Education best books of 2016 (Link) | 12/22/2016 Read: Just Vibrations celebrated the Dartmouth News (Link) | 12/7/2016 Read: Just Vibrations discussed in Dartmouth Library Muse article on Open Access text (Link) | 11/14/2016 Read: Poem by William Cheng in Ethnomusicology Review (Link) | 11/10/2016 Read: William Cheng's interview in Junction Magazine (Link) | 9/2/2016 Read: William Cheng's excerpt in the Huffington Post (Link) | 8/23/2016 Read: William Cheng's excerpt in Musicology Now (Link) | 8/26/2016