Overview

How do we listen to the earth? That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Listening Through Earth's Soundscapes. Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Joshua Dittrich explores the material and metaphorical geology of the sonic environment. 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. The analytical task of Geosonics is to tune into 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.

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Reviews

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 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA * Josh 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, Associate Professor, Miami University, USA, and author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019) *

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 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA * Josh 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, Associate Professor, Miami University, USA, and author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019) *

Author Information

Joshua Dittrich teaches creative non-fiction and media studies at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information & Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University, USA, and a PhD in Communication & Culture from York University, Canada. His work has appeared in journals such as Substance, Intermedialities, Ethnologies, and New German Critique, as well as the edited volume Utopia: The Avant-garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, part of the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Series.

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