Aural Cultures is an anthology edited by Jim Drobnick that offers a cross-disciplinary analysis of sound art. The book features essays that explore a variety of listening and sounding practices. The authors discuss the relationship between sight and sound, as well as, listening and identity. They assume critical listening positionalities that consider the social, cultural, and political consequences of sound in order to complicate methods of passive consumption.

Contents:

Acknowledgments;

Listening Awry by Jim Drobnick;

The Social Discipline of Listening by Richard Leppert;

What Did Van Gogh Hear?: Vibrations, Wagner, and Voices by Peter L. Schmunk;

Speeches of Display: Museum Audioguides by Artists by Jennifer Fisher;

Artists Pages: Santiago Sierra, Christian Marclay, Shirin Neshat, Su-Mei Tse, Martin Kersels, Kim Sooja;

Flatus Vocis: Somatic Winds by Christof Migone;

Voices in My Head by Georgina Kleege;

Accidental Voices: The Return of the Countertenor by Sherry Simon;

Temporality in Twelfth Night by Wes Folkerth;

Polyphonic Aurality and John Cage by Robert Bean;

Susan Hiller with Mary Horlock;

Raymond Gervais;

Looking at Records by Philip Auslander;

"Worrying the Note": Inaudible Beats in the Gangsta Film by Jodi Brooks;

On Sound Atmospheres by Gabor Csepregi;

Soundscape Works, Listening, and the Touch of Sound by Andra McCartney;

Civic Virtue and Religious Reason: An Islamic Counter-Public by Charles Hirschkind;

Local Sounds, Popular Technologies: History and Historicity in Andean Radio by Daniel Fisher;

Ann Hamilton;

Daniel Olson;

Performing at the Edge of Hearing: The Third Ear by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren;

Sound Thinking by David Howes;

Echoes of a Yolmo Buddhist's Life, in Death by Robert Desjarlais;

Aural Cultures Artists' Pages and CD by Jim Drobnick;

Notes on Contributors;

Credits.