I am happy to announce the recent publication of my book, Geosonics: Listening Through Earth’s Soundscapes (Bloomsbury).
Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Geosonics explores the material and imaginary geology of sonic environments.
It is available now, and if you order it from Bloomsbury before October 6th, you’ll receive a 30% discount.
Joshua Dittrich, PhD
Lecturer, ICCIT, University of Toronto, Mississauga
How do we listen to the earth? That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Listening Through Earth’s Soundscapes.
In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site, or simple “surrounding”; environment is immanently implicated in the chains of mediation that make up the material and imaginative infrastructure of our lives. Geosonics tunes in to that infrastructure through sound. Drawing on influential work in sound studies around the concept of transduction, this book explores how listening does not take place in a pre-existing soundscape, but rather makes place by etching out a mediated, mutually constitutive set of relations between listeners, media, and environments.
“Geosonics takes us to unheard-of aural worlds. From earthquakes to timestretching, from sleep music to Afrofuturism—each chapter is brimming with fresh and provocative ideas. Joshua Dittrich dissects vibrations and fuses frequencies, he takes apart the process of listening and builds it together again and sensitizes our ears to the challenges of our times.”—Alexander Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Harvard University, USA
“This brilliant book—riveting, resounding with analyses that constantly burrow into unexpected places—asks how scientists and publics sound out the Earth, offering a range of arresting answers that take readers on adventures across layers of listening, from deep underground to planetary orbit. Prepare to have your sense of the very world itself retuned!”—Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT, USA
“Geosonics carefully examines moments of transductive mediation, unsettling expectations of sonic immediacy and presence. A brilliant contribution to environmental media studies, this book teaches us how to listen through all kinds of soundscapes—internal, nonconscious, seismic, experimental, and utopian.’’—Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
“Joshua Dittrich drills down on our mediated relationship to the planet we inhabit while also unearthing the elemental nature of our media technologies—digital devices whose components are made of the very Earth they represent. Geosonics mines the doubly extractive nature of media, which produce partial realities ‘by breaking up the earth, one piece at a time, with each world they construct.’ Scholars in media, sound, and environmental studies will all dig it!’’—Mack Hagood, Robert H. and Nancy J. Blaney Associate Professor of Media, Journalism, and Film, Miami University, USA
