“Keep it Weird”: Listening with Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025)
Dr. Jonathan Sterne passed away earlier this year. He was, in many ways, a model scholar and colleague.
The intellectual ferment of the field now called “sound studies” is often traced to the sonic ecologists of the 1960s, but the theoretical energy of the early 2000s, generated by figures such as Ana Maria Ochoa, Alexander Weheliye, Emily Thompson, Trevor Pinch (1952-2021), and of course Jonathan Sterne, was necessary for the field to gain interdisciplinary traction in the twenty-first century. Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: 2003) was perhaps the single-most important book in this regard.
Trained in communications, and working in departments of communication, first at Pitt and later McGill, Sterne oriented his work toward media studies, and indeed, The Audible Past is principally about mediation. It poses questions about the role of sound in the history of mediation that earlier generations of sound studies had tended to elide, especially regarding the contingent and often cultural role of the human ear in reception. These questions opened the door for anthropologists, historians, communications scholars and ethnomusicologists in particular to think and even identify with sound studies, and many of us who were trained in the 2000s did so enthusiastically, with Sterne’s writing a lodestar.
The enduring terms and frameworks that came from The Audible Past alone are remarkable: the audiovisual litany, a critique of the chestnut that hearing and vision are ideological binaries, for example, is practically axiomatic now in sound studies. And its clever expression of the audiovisual binary’s religious undertones (see also “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality” [2011], one of many worthwhile Sternian deep cuts) further thickens the plot. Consider as well the concept of “audile techniques,” or vernacular methods of audition that emerge in response to new sound reproduction technologies, which has been used to frame countless projects in sonic histories of science, medicine, business, and technology. To revisit The Audible Past now is to witness a thinker who anticipated the central questions of an emergent field at the moment of its rekindling, with prescience and depth.
Sterne’s focus on media continued, although his second monograph—and Sounding Out!’s first book review!– MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press: 2012) saw a move toward Marxist economic analysis, the kind of methodological shift that he would pull off time and again. The book is almost certainly the most complete treatment of what was (and to some degree remains) the world’s most important audio reproduction format, and once again he introduced a concept, that of “format theory,” that is widely and actively cited (and reviewed by Pitchfork!). The book is also funny! Sterne’s revelation of the Napster cat head logo at the end of a chapter about the role of cat heads in auditory lab experiments is the sort of superb comic timing which, to put it lightly, one doesn’t find much in academic writing.
Sterne was not limited to media-focused work, however. He was responsive to current events: his 2012 “Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest,” for instance, was an on-the-spot reading of the sonic tactics of local student tuition strikes. He worked ethnographically: a 1997 article, published in Ethnomusicology and called “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” is an immersive study of music in retail space. He was an excellent editor: his 2012 The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge) is superbly curated, remaining a cornerstone assignment. More recently, he turned to disability studies, publishing Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press) in 2022. The book is philosophical as well as reflexive and personal, showcasing yet more of his range. The way that Sterne allowed curiosity to lead his research in many directions suggests a scholar who was in the business for the right reasons.
Yet still this breadth and influence pales compared to what he arguably did best and most enthusiastically – mentoring students. He did not advise me formally, but when I was a graduate student he was friendly and accessible, which since his admission to hospice I have learned he was for many other people as well. Like the enduringly resonant concepts in The Audible Past and other books, bits of his advice still ring in my ears, and I pass those tidbits on to other students now. His letters of recommendation for his own students were inspired, indeed among the most thoughtful I’ve ever read. He respected his students enormously, and on their behalf wrote long, detailed letters in which they were cast as mature thinkers, and their scholarship as a serious project.
There are many scholars whom we might memorialize for their published contributions, but we should reserve a higher space for those whose mentorship commitments were as deep as Sterne’s. For all of his critical insights, he was motivated in the end not by status but by community, which the outpouring of sadness at his passing reveals above all. Farewell, then, to an architect of sound studies who, safe to say, was also widely loved.
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PS: We encourage you to leave “Sterne stories” and other memories of Jonathan in the comments to this post.
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Benjamin Tausig is associate professor of music at SUNY-Stony Brook University, and author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford, 2019) and Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke, 2025).
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest–Jonathan Sterne
Sounding Out! Podcast #27: Interview with Jonathan Sterne
This is What It Sounds Like . . . . . . . . On Prince (1958-2016) and Interpretive Freedom–Benjamin Tausig
SO! Amplifies: The Electric Golem (Trevor Pinch and James Spitznagel)—Qiushi Xu
SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format–-Aaron Trammell
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SO! Reads: Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin
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Voice and sound theorist Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025) is a remarkable work that reconfigures the ways we define “voice.” The text is organized into three sections—Part 1: Plastic (Emergence of Voice as Skin), Part 2: Electric (Embodiment of Voice as Skin), and Part 3: Haptic (Mediation of Voice as Skin)—each articulating Bulut’s exploration of the simultaneously personal and collaborative ways voice evolves among various sonic entities and environments. Through analyses of several artistic works that experiment with sound, Bulut successfully highlights the social effects of these pieces and how they alter our expectations of what it means to communicate and be understood.
It’s easy to reduce one’s understanding of voice to the purely spoken, the dialogic, the linguistically communicative, but Bulut’s conception of voice reaches beyond these forms. In her introduction, she states that she represents voice as something that “…evolves, through varied sounds, senses, bodies and technologies. In other words… distributed forms and instances of voice, which underlie the making of a voice, instead of giving a voice to something or someone, or being given a voice” (1). Whereas it may be easy to consider voice as something insular and complete, Bulut argues that it is in fact highly contestable, and shifts based on various environmental/social circumstances—this she aptly labels the “plasticity of voice.” Since Bulut envisions voice as something malleable, this unearths its responsive potentials, and eventually leads us to the image that Bulut will repeatedly return to over the course of the text—”voice as skin.”
Initially, “voice as skin” may seem perplexing, as these two elements appear in direct contrast to each other. However, I believe that the blending of these assumedly divergent facets is what makes Bulut’s work and scholarship so strong. None of her arguments complacently subsiston the known, the expected, and so when she presents voice as skin, it makes sense that she has formed this concept in order to continue extending her readers’ understandings of how we embody and experience sound.
Voice as skin is meant to illuminate the responses and sonic productions that often go unnoticed. It is a dynamic presence that defies static restrictions desperate to make it only one thing. It is “…imagining voice as a multisensory interface, a tactile and haptic affect across bodies of all kinds, without being limited to the human body, to human audition or the labels of verbal language” (234). As you proceed with Bulut’s argument, voice as skin repeatedly arises in different, somewhat surprising iterations throughout the chapters, continuously reframing the ways one may consider the experiential potentials and qualities of sound. “Voice is already a plural phenomenon” (218) Bulut states, “Each one of us carries another’s voice” (218). Everyone is in possession of their own sonic productions, but because we exist within a shared sonic landscape—Bulut regards this through Bruce Odland’s concept of the “sonic commons”—we have to become more sensitive resonant sources for the sounds that are directed at and emerge from this voice as skin.
Bulut makes it clear that there is a consequence to sound. Even when an individual is not engaged in dialogue or aurally responding to some other sonic stimuli, there is a voicing—a reaction, a sensing, a renegotiation of the body within the shifting soundscape—that occurs. Bulut analyzes a myriad of experimental sound artworks throughout Building a Voice, but her analysis of Pauline Oliveros’s Environmental Dialogue is where she really drives home the various ways in which one may “respond” to sound: “You listen to the sound attentively, and may respond to it or not… Regardless of a vocal or instrumental articulation of a pitch, therewould be a mental reinforcement in the process” (68). In later chapters, specifically those in Part 3 that discuss gesture as voice and biosensing musical interfaces, Bulut states that “Bodies constantly talk” (173)—that is, they inherently articulate something that either represents themselves or a reaction to another sonic production.
What Bulut’s readers receive throughout Building a Voice is a work of scholarship that strives against the possibility of sonic apathy. Even while attempting to not respond to a sound or pitch, one still notes—pun intended—the impact of these sonic productions on themselves and the space around them. Not saying anything is still a statement, Bulut reveals. It still “voices.”
Bulut’s diversification of voicing is astounding to read, but what I admire most about Building a Voice is that it underscores the importance of hearing. When Bulut discusses the ways we do or do not listen, I believe her scholarship becomes especially timely. In Part 2, Chapter 6: “Sharing a Skin,” Bulut describes the limits of empathy when it comes to fully hearing another individual: “We hear one another through our own wounds and then only partially” (134). She doesn’t make this claim to invalidate others’ efforts to show empathy. In fact, I think there is significant care contained in this specific argument. Rather than believe one is innately endowed with the skills to hear someone, or assume someone has the ability to fully hear us, Bulut encourages her readers to approach these experiences with humility:
We may be frustrated with the fact that no one truly understands or hears us, or that someone imagines that they understand us when they don’t. There is no full translation or hearing of anything. We can only connect in parts. We can only be a sounding board that both echoes and diffracts (134).
We are living in a time where several historically vulnerable communities face daily antagonization at home and abroad. Simply opening social media will present you with multiple posts pleading for allies to speak out for those facing ridicule, abuse, and even annihilation. For individuals who elect to answer those calls—who feel compelled to take on the profound commitment of assuming a “voice” for these communities—Bulut’s book provides some necessary food for thought. If we cannot fully hear nor understand those we wish to advocate for or protect, how might we renegotiate our current styles of activism away from the idea of “giving voice” (or, for that matter, considering anyone to be “voiceless”)? How might we honor the differences between individuals without viewing this as a move toward disconnection, an acceptance of inaction?
Building a Voice is an exciting text because it presents one with so many beautiful examples of experimental sound art, but I believe it becomes asocially integral work when Bulut indicates why revolutionizing the way we execute our methods of hearing and voicing is so important. By this, she doesn’t just illustrate the ways in which one builds a voice, she also reveals how one builds a kind of sonic and social consciousness. To read Building a Voice is to have one’s understanding of their own and the world’s resonant capabilities irreversibly transformed. This is writing about sound on another frequency—it’s time to tune in.
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Featured Image: “Plantar Aspect,” by Pekka Nikrus, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Enikő Deptuch Vághy is a poet, artist, and editor. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, she is the Founding EIC of the literary and arts journal Lover’s Eye Press.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
Listening to and through “Need”: Sound Studies and Civic Engagement–Christie Zwahlen
“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas
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