Listening to War

Norie Neumark, University of Melbourne, Journal of Sonic Studies To say that Listening to War is ground-breaking, penetrating, and vitally important doesn't begin to convey the affective and intellectual impact of engaging with this work. More than challenging music and sound apprehension and scholarship, the book offers painful, visceral access to the ways in which ears suffer, bodies suffer, places suffer in wartime. There is no escape into abstraction or aestheticization here. It's shattering, from the very beginning...

Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside 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.

Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format 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.

Gage Averill, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia 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.

American Musicological Society
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 develop...

J. Martin Daughtry is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and sound studies at New York University. His work centers on acoustic violence; voice; listening; sound studies; the Iraq war, and musics of the Russian-speaking world. Daughtry is co-editor, with Jonathan Ritter, of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge 2007), and has published essays in Social Text, Ethnomusicology, Music and Politics, Russian Literature, Poetics Today, and a number of edited collections.

Dedication Note on Transliteration Introduction: Composing Thoughts on Sound and Violence -In Lieu of an Epigraph: Sound-centered Memories of Operation Iraqi Freedom -The Belliphonic -Intellectual Predecessors -A Necessary Detour -Approaches and Challenges Fragment #1: The Presence of Mind to Save an Ear: Ali's Story Section I: Sonic Materiel Chapter 1: Belliphonic Sounds and Indoctrinated Ears: The Elements of Wartime Audition -Charting the Belliphonic -Listening, Structure, and Positionality -Vehicular Sounds -Communications -Civilian Sounds -Weapons Chapter 2: Mapping Zones of Wartime (In)audition -The Zone of the Audible Inaudible -The Narrational Zone -The Tactical Zone -The Trauma Zone -A Complicating Factor: Iraqi Civilian Auditors -Another Complicating Factor: Sound and Psychological Trauma -Conclusion Fragment #2: Stealth and Improvisation in the Desert: Jason's Story Fragment #3: Loudly Searching in the Resonant Darkness: The Anatomy of a Nighttime House Raid Section II: Structures of Listening, Sounding, and Emplacement Introduction to section II Chapter 3: Auditory Regimes -Ideals of Military Audition -National Audition -Oblique Indoctrination of Belliphonic Ears -Situational Awareness -The Inclusive Auditory Regime of Iraqi Civilians -Auditory Literacy, Competence, Virtuosity -Incommensurability Chapter 4: Sonic Campaigns -Sound (and Violence) -Violence (and Sound) -The Omnidirectionality of Sound and Violence -Sonic Campaigns Chapter 5: Acoustic Territories -Emplacement, Displacement, Transplacement -Sound and Territoriality -The Virtual Acoustic Territory of Recorded Sound -The Radiant Acoustic Territories of Wartime -The Resonant Acoustic Territories of Baghdad -The Resonant Acoustic Territory of the body -Life at the Intersection of Regime, Campaign and Territory Fragment #4: Fatal Mishearing Section III: Music, Mediation, and Survival Chapter 6: Mobile Music in the Military -Introducing the Wartime iPod -A Century of Recorded Music on the Battlefield -iPods in the Iraq War -Amping Up, Staying Focused, Cooling Down: Technologies of Self-regulation in Combat -Moving Bodies, Loosening Tongues, Adjusting Crosshairs: Technologies for Manipulating Others in Combat -Concluding Thoughts Fragment #5: From "Hell's Bells" to "Silent Night": A Conversation about Music in the Military Fragment #6: Keeping the Music Turned Down Low: Shymaa's Story Chapter 7: A Time of Troubles for Iraqi Music -Iraq's Musical Legacy -Post-invasion Challenges -Political Violence -Sectarian Violence -U.S. Forces Targeting Music -The Attenuated Acoustic Territory of Iraqi Musical Practice Conclusion: The Amplitude of Violence Fragment #7: Listening as Poiesis: Tareq's Story Acknowledgments Glossary Works Cited Index