Interrogating the recent proliferation of audio apps, smart speakers, sleep aids, and prenatal sound systems that promise a better life through sound, this book explores how these technologies came to be promoted as a cheap solution for capitalism’s inevitable crisis of reproduction. Marie Thompson shows how—at a time when, for many, accessing and providing care are increasingly under pressure—sound and music are sold as tools to support caregiving, child rearing, domestic management, and pregnancy. Connecting this phenomenon to shifting gendered, racial, and global divisions of labor, the making of the modern family, the changing political economy of music, and evolving discourses of automation, The Sonic Surrogate sheds light on the many reproductions implicated in sound reproduction.

About the Author

Marie Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at The Open University. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism.

Reviews

“In The Sonic Surrogate, Marie Thompson reveals how deeply enmeshed sound and music are with social reproduction, including the gendered forms of exploitation it simultaneously relies upon and reinforces. This is a necessary and timely book, all the more so given the intensifying crises that confront both music and social reproduction at present.”—Eric Drott, author of Streaming Music, Streaming Capital

“This rigorous and timely book offers a wide-ranging study of the ways that sound-mediating technologies shape key aspects of our lives, our relationships, and our understanding of the world. By centering these technologies in her examination of social reproductive labor's increasing commodification and automation over time, Thompson makes a major contribution not only to sound studies but to the whole feminist-Marxist tradition itself.”—Marianna Ritchey, author of Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era

“The Sonic Surrogate is rich and original, a compelling cultural history of technologies of sound reproduction and their intersection with social reproduction and the making of the modern family form. Thompson’s unique expertise in Marxist feminist theory and sound studies shines through, providing fascinating insight into how contemporary media technologies are shaped by histories of taste, music, and the sociopolitical dynamics of auditory culture. A perfect demonstration of the kind of critical political feminist edge contemporary studies of technology so desperately need.”—Thao Phan, coeditor of Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of Ethics in AI