Hold Music

The notion of sonic intimacy has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but less well-established has been what it means for a sonic encounter to be non-intimate. This essay proposes an opposite to sonic intimacy, namely so…

Muzak, Lo-Fi, and Acoustic Violence

Violence, including acoustic violence, can be remarkably resistant to critique; the semiotic structures upon which scholarly arguments rely may appear, in their representationalism, to have a distancing effect from the sheer materialism of v…