Geosonics

How do we listen to the earth? That is the central question posed in Geosonics: Listening Through Earth’s Soundscapes.

Working across sound studies, media theory, and environmental media studies, Joshua Dittrich explores the material and metaphorical geology of the sonic environment. In an epoch of climate crisis, environment is no longer a neutral background, site, or simple “surrounding”: environment is immanently implicated in the chains of mediation that make up the material and imaginative infrastructure of our lives. The analytical task of Geosonics is to tune into that infrastructure through sound. Drawing on influential work in sound studies around the concept of transduction, this book explores how listening does not take place in a pre-existing soundscape, but rather makes place by etching out a mediated, mutually constitutive set of relations between listeners, media, and environments.

Author Biography

Joshua Dittrich teaches creative non-fiction and media studies at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information & Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University, USA, and a PhD in Communication & Culture from York University, Canada. His work has appeared in journals such as Substance, Intermedialities, Ethnologies, and New German Critique, as well as the edited volume Utopia: The Avant-garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, part of the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Series.