Listening to War

This book is profound and urgently important. It is literally a study of war, not its outcomes. Daughtry expands ethnomusicologists' most basic assumptions, stepping sideways from music to the moment when sound creates and obliterates the self. He parses the inhabited, diachronic moment of sonic violence in a way I wouldn't have thought critically possible. Listening to War is stunningly smart, informed, and original. Virtually every sentence made me pause. Daughtry shows how ethnomusicology can-and should-address the most pressing issues of our time. --Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside Although the sounds of war are often recounted in art and scholarship, Listening to War is the first book I know of that helps us to really understand them. J. Martin Daughtry uses the anthropology of sound and hearing to offer a profound investigation of the experience of being close to violence-both of people physically proximate to violence and people unable to extricate themselves from it, either during wartime or afterward. This is a rare scholarly book: gripping, haunting, troubling and deeply edifying. I could not put it down. --Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format More than any other ethnomusicologist over the last decade, J. Martin Daughtry has challenged and deeply reconfigured my understanding of sound, and that's not trivial considering that I taught a course called Sound for many years. In this book he performs an extraordinary trick: he has taken the web of sonic violence that surrounds all in a theatre of war and he has extended the intimate and visceral experience of its power and its horror to his readers. Daughtry has immersed us in the most important work of sound studies in many years. --Gage Averill, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia I have not read a more thorough case study of military conflict and sound, one that is so scrupulously documented, with its own implications and methodologies so fully explored. If, in fact, this study is exhaustive, what is the next step in research? The monograph gestures toward some answers. For example, the discussion of acoustic territories (p. 189 and elsewhere) is a further reminder of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and the physical environment, and fortifies the argument that the study of sonic experience provides the most promising platform for the further development of studies in cognitive theory. Apart from its own awe-inspiring comprehensiveness, the book provides a foundation for continued exploration of such emergent fields as cognitive ecology, extended mind theory, and the relationship between gesture and cognition. -- American Musicological Society