Lawrence Kramer 
The Hum of the World 
A Philosophy of Listening

The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. This innovative meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure waiting when we learn that the world is alive with sound.

Table of Content

Prelude

Sound and Knowledge

The Audiable: An Introduction

Some Leitmotifs

The Standard of Vision

A Philosophy of Listening?

Constructive Description

Sight, Sound, and Language

The Sound of Words

Seeing, Saying, and Hearing

The Audiable: Variations on a Theme

Music in the Air

“No Sound without Music”

Language and the Human

Lord Bacon’s Echoes

Ripple Effects: Distant Voices

The Infinite Broadcast

Immanence

Reading Transfigured: St. Augustine

To the Life: The Image

Moving Pictures

Modern Times: The Cartoon

The Sound of Meaning

Music and the Audiable: A Suite in Three Movements

Plato’s Singing School

Musical Synesthesia

The Music of Language

The Soundscape

Song

Noise and Silence

Fish, Flesh, or Fowl

Sensory Hybrids

“Waiting to Be the Music”

Circle Songs

Forty-Part Motets

The Ether

Elemental Media

Elemental Fluids

Writing the Soundscape

Haunting Melodies

The Lifelike: The Undead

Beyond Words? 1

The Audiable and the Audible

Into Silence

Enchantments of the Name

The Inaudible

On Saying “I am”

The Shriek

Metal

Here Comes That Song Again

The Mirror of Silence

Rhythmic Hearing

Media All the Way Down

The Auditory Window

Cacophony: Dispossession (Beckett)

Euphony: Repossession (Beckett)

Worldly Dissonance

Sounds of Battle: The Civil War

Sounds of Battle: World War I

Ulysses in Auschwitz

Intermezzo

Sounding Bodies

Pandemonium?

Songs of Entropy

By Hand

Past and Present

Consciousness


Acknowledgments

Index

About the author

Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, is an award-winning composer and the author of fifteen previous books, most of them with University of California Press, including The Thought of Music, winner of the 2017 ASACP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism.