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Interrogating the 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, childrearing, 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.
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.
“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
“Thompson’s unique expertise shines through, providing fascinating insight into how contemporary media technologies are shaped by histories of taste, music, and the sociopolitical dynamics of auditory culture. The Sonic Surrogate is 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