Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise

A 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1. Critical Temporalities 2. Noise and Political Economy 3. Remembering the Future: 1977 - 2017 4. Continuous Discontinuity: A Non-Linear History of Noise Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Stephen Kennedy is Principal Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the Department of Creative Professions & Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich, UK.

Review :
As his book unfolds, Kennedy shows readers the intricate political, societal, and cultural connections between the constructs of time, space, and sound… This thought-provoking, brilliantly written book will resonate for generations to come. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. For Kennedy, the algorithmic digital economy of our times is manufacturing a torrential complexity that necessitates a radical departure in our modes of critical thinking, a turn that seeks not simply to elevate the sonic to the status of the visual but, rather, to deploy a pansonic mode of engagement. The political project here is clear: we need to attend to this complexity rather than abdicate responsibility of its meanings to automated algorithmic selection, perceptual coding, cloaking technologies and noise filtering processes. We need not only to bring the noise but to turn it up. Think of this not as an analysis but rather a clarion call from the future anterior of music that demands that we listen in the full knowledge that we may well not yet know what to do in the face of the noise that we hear. In Future Sounds we inhabit noise as it constructs and ruptures time and space. Drawing on a wide range of authors including Bergson, Hainge and Sterne, Stephen Kennedy shows us how the undercurrent of noise drives us and washes us up on the shores of coalescing political and cultural epochs such as the digital, by way of Howard Devoto and Paul Klee. Noise, clamour, chaos: In Future Sounds Kennedy has brilliantly shown how the non-linearity and multi-temporality of noise has been productive of so called digital culture. Key reading for anyone interested in the realities of the digital age and the most relevant philosophies of time and technology, Future Sounds gives us an entirely unique way to see how digital culture has been characterised by noise, rather than dialectics. Using examples from punk to electronic sounds to glam experimentalists to computer noise, Kennedy shows how music has been entangled in political economy. He argues insightfully that music, rather than acting as a herald of a possible shared future, is instead entirely mixed up in the clamour of the present. A key argument of this book has to do with media time, particularly concerning the type of temporality expressed by noise. Another key feature is Kennedy's argument that noise can be used as an analytical tool to begin to theorise the uncertainty of the digital. Kennedy shows how noise is a productive way to understand this discontinuity of digital time and how this can be used to think through modes of politically informed practice amongst a world where everything comes from everywhere, all at once.