Sound Affects

Sound Affects: A User’s Guide is a collection of sonically-charged concepts ranging from those felt, ‘heard’ and repeated (silence, the oriental riff, shuffle), to the vocal (whispers, sing, the disembodied voice), to sounds at the threshold (tin/ny, thump, buzz) to sounds beyond the limits of audibility (inaudible tremors, distortion, sub-bass). Sound Affects invites the reader to reflect on the ways that sounds produce affects and the ways that affects can operate as sound. Each of the entries develops a particular perspective on sound and affect through a close analysis of audiovisual and/or sonic objects. The objects chosen not only illustrate the concept in question but also demonstrate how the object encourages us to rethink the relationships between sounds and affects. Influenced by the sound theory of Eugenie Brinkema (2011), the concepts of Sound Affects plot the shift in volume from silence that opens up a space to be heard to the audibly near, from the audibly near to sounds beyond the limits of audibility. Sound Affects is an intellectual adventure for those who theorize and listen. The book can also be enjoyed as a narrative of sounds, its absences and its shifting intensities.

Sharon Jane Mee is Adjunct Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research applies poststructuralist and posthuman-feminist approaches to questions of the sensory and sensuous cinematic experience, and the aesthetics and ethics of rhythm, movement, and affect in experimental film and horror film. Her publications include The Pulse in Cinema: The Aesthetics of Horror (2020) and 'Thinking|Feeling Animality: Posthuman-Feminist Perspectives' in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (forthcoming).

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010) and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012) and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (2009). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Luke Robinson is a PhD candidate and a Casual Academic in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia. He is an executive member of the Sydney Screen Studies Network (https://facebook.com/SydneyScreenStudies/) and a video artist working with Move in Pictures (https://www.move-in-pictures.com). His research interests are classical Hollywood film, film theory, politics of erasure, and theories of film sound. He is currently co-editing a book on single shots in Alfred Hitchcock's films.

Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, program director of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures, and co-director of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003); Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (with Rosi Braidotti; 2012) and The Neuro-Image (2012). See for articles, her blog, and other information at www.patriciapisters.com.