Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research.

Attitudes to the relationship between music and deafness suffer from two related misconceptions: the enduring assumption that hearing is central to musical experience in conjunction with an extreme impression of deafness as total aural loss; and, more recently, the tendency to reduce deaf listening to tactility, as narratives about inborn sensory acuities among the deaf proliferate in the popular imaginary. Increasingly, deafness symbolizes a set of sensory polarities that obscure an intrinsic diversity of musical experiences from which musicology stands to gain, a diversity that encompasses members of Deaf culture and non-culturally deaf people alike, and that is signaled through the person-centered compound “d/Deaf.” My article builds on recent music scholarship on disability to offer a pluralistic understanding of music and deafness. Beginning with Scottish deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, I investigate a range of d/Deaf accounts of music, including those of Deaf sign language users, hearing aid wearers, and cochlear implant recipients, and of people with music-induced hearing loss. Deafness resists automatic entry points into music, unsettling any straightforward hierarchy of the senses. Deaf people reflect on the musical status of aurality in markedly different ways, just as they offer a complex understanding of vision and touch. For instance, vision is a highly versatile listening strategy and is often more reliable than vibration; touch is feasible because of its contextual dependence on visual cues, and is further tied to a set of material and environmental variables. Ultimately, I argue that d/Deaf listeners enrich customary notions of musical expertise: deafness belongs in musicology as a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening.

This paper proposes an analytic attention to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. It asks how circulating forces are generated as atmospheres per se, how they spawn worlds, animate forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background of living in and living through things. Writing through several small cases selected out of countless potentially describable moments and scenes in which the sense of something happening becomes tactile, I try to open a proliferative list of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense of something coming into existence or something waning, sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost or promising? I suggest that atmospheric attunements are palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial.

In 21st-century China, “being political” can mean many things, particularly as discourses on the global economy, environmental pollution, consumerism, sensual perceptions and gender politics become increasingly concrete at local levels. Contemporary Chinese sound artists go beyond the mere use of the language of propaganda and instead make works that play different sociopolitical roles—heroic, observant or participatory—to address sociocultural, sensual and spiritual issues. The author shows that the political statement made by a sound work in China depends to a great degree on the sociopolitical contexts in which the work is exhibited and performed, as well as the sociopolitical identity of its creator.

Creators of sound art consider sound as both a tangible reality and a conceptual term; sound art works rely on and use listening as their predominant mode of perception. The author contextualizes sound art in China and problematizes existing venues where sound art is performed and exhibited. She then suggests that a proper space is necessary to certain works of sound art, and she proposes the “big can” as an ideal venue, based upon previous experience with existing art spaces as well as the unique nature of sound art. Sound generates space; now it is time to make space for sound.

This article proposes that China’s sound practice does more than simply provide cultural content for already existing sound making and performing formulas. Beyond this, it also affords “affective listening,” a mode of listening that acknowledges the coexistence of the somatic, relational, and spiritual relations among participants and the environment.

This essay critiques the notion of soundscape and proposes the concept of acoustic milieus as an alternative conceptual tool to facilitate our understanding of the human condition mediated through and with sound. As a kind of ‘charged atmosphere’ to use Kathleen Stewart’s expression, an acoustic milieu, offers a rich understanding of everyday practice which often seems to be banal, ephemeral and resistant of scholarly interpretation. An acoustic milieu, similar to any charged atmosphere, is not completely natural or neutral; they are sentient, technical and anthropological. They are composed, set in motion and, if not taken care of, puffed out or exhausted away. An acoustic milieu, like a spider web, a kind of ‘exorganismes’, to use Bernard Stiegler’s language, once created, reciprocates a new kind of life. To answer to the call of Gregory Bateson that one needs to think ecologically, an acoustic milieu is a conceptual tool to help one towards perceiving the circuit, rather than just its arc.