Hi all,

Our next meeting will be August 10, 2020 at 12 p.m. (EDT) / 5 p.m. (BST) and we’ll be discussing Robin James’s recent book, The Sonic Episteme.

This time we’ll all be reading the introduction plus one chapter of our choice and reporting back on it to the group, so the meeting will be a little more structured than they have been in the past. But feel free to join even if you have not focused in on any chapter and are still interested in discussing this exciting book.

I (Eamonn) gave this book a cursory reading a couple of months ago and, well, there’s a lot to think through and I’m pleased to have the chance to revisit it with you all. Some of the key launching-off points in James’s book include the work of Mary Beth Mader, Shannon Winnubst and Jacques Rancière. These names might not be immediately familiar to those of us who read/write about music (not I, anyway) but they are very productively introduced here.

I mention this litany now just to flag up that, in my view, the arguments that these authors make about a new calculative rationality that is driven by statistical modeling and prediction (which James holds is symptomatic of neoliberalism) are—for better or worse—foundational to some of the main arguments of the book. If, like me, you had trouble evaluating these authors on their own disciplinary terms, my advice is to push through to the relatively frequent concrete musical/sonic examples or case studies that make the case for thinking about sound in this way more vividly. That’s my 2¢ anyway.

You might also be interested in checking out James’s podcast mini-series about the book, the first two episodes of which she has posted here: https://www.its-her-factory.com/2020/05/the-sonic-episteme-podcast/.

Please reach out to any of us on Twitter for the link to the Jitsi meeting and/or a link to the readings.

All welcome!

— Eamonn and Ezra