Available From UC Press

From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life.
 
Experiencing Sound presents its subject as fundamental to all experience—sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience.
 
Through a series of brief, lyrical forays, Kramer shows that sound, whether heard or unheard, is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer—or be made to suffer—as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew.

Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of fifteen previous books, including The Thought of Music, The Hum of the World, and Music and the Forms of Life. He is also an award-winning composer whose works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe.

"This wide-ranging book reveals Lawrence Kramer's command of poetry, novels, music, philosophy, history, and other topics too numerous to list. Refreshingly free of jargon, Experiencing Sound should be required reading for anyone who cares about how we understand ourselves and navigate the world through sound."—Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

"Kramer ventures far off the beaten paths of sound studies. With inspiring intellectual ease, he strolls with his reader across the whole of Western cultural history, inviting us to hear music, literature, and philosophy in entirely new ways. This is the work of a master essayist."—Axel Englund, author of Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage