Atmospheric Noise

Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles, and coeditor of Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art.

“An exemplary experiment in compositional thinking and writing, Atmospheric Noise buzzes with conceptual and methodological inventiveness. Through the style in which it deftly traces the uneven emergence and refraction of urban noise across archives, concepts, bodies, regulations, and experience, Marina Peterson's book brilliantly performs its own argument about the importance of an ethos of informed listening. Atmospheric Noise should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in understanding and writing about the atmospheric conditions of worlds.” - Derek P. McCormack, author of (Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment) “Writing in and through the movements of people, butterflies, planes, and homes; the shifts in environmental discourse; and varied human-nonhuman entanglements, Marina Peterson brings us a story and a book that will resonate across fields for years to come. Original, compelling, and evocative.” - Nicole Starosielski, author of (The Undersea Network) "Peterson’s prose is always lyric, tidal almost, but she sacrifices neither scholarly rigor nor theoretical ferocity in her pursuit of how sound gets us into questions, spaces, activities, constructions, and the politics of infrastructure. Atmospheric Noise is the story of a city remade (parts indeed sacrificed) around an airport, flight paths, and racket. It’s also the story of instrumentation, calibration, and how we both measure and experience what we claim to know. It’s a shining example of what, with care, ethnography can be." - Gretchen Bakke (Public Books) "Peterson conceptualizes the act of listening as an intervention into the atmosphere, which originates these categories and definitions, while sound itself remains immaterial and unquantifiable. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." (Choice) "Atmospheric Noise is an engaging and timely piece of scholarship. At its most successful, the work draws jarring, cacophonous resonances between the science and engineering of acoustics, urban political economy, governmentality, the metaphysics of sound, and the social construction of ecology and environment. It amplifies the possibilities of social science inquiry in its call for attunement to noise, to sound, to an atmospheric sensibility as method." - Andrew Merrill (Public) "Atmospheric Noise is a rich and complex interrogation of urban noise, and there is much to engage readers interested in sonic philosophy, auditory culture, and histories of acoustics. . . . Atmospheric Noise offers an original account of how the sounds of Los Angeles airport came to shape lives, neighbourhoods, and the urban environment." - Marie Thompson (Yearbook for Traditional Music) "This study offers researchers in fields including music, sound studies, urban planning, and American studies a model for the possible contributions of new materialism’s methodological assumptions. In doing so it invites readers and researchers to be sensitive to new attunements demanded by the changing (post)human onto-epistemologies supporting our own entanglements with the sonic in music and other regimes of tonality." - Andrew J. Kluth (Journal of the Society for American Music)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Aerial Attunements  192. Noise Annoys  453. Environmental Imaginaries  774. Murmurs: Experiments in Glitching  1055. Vibrating Matter  1296. Indefinite Urbanism  155Notes  185References  207Index  231