SINISTER Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener

This is a major new philosophical work from one of the world's most erudite, intellectual, and influential thinkers and writers about sound and music. "Sinister Resonance" argues that sound - the entire continuum of the audible and inaudible spectrum, including silence, noise, quiet, implicit and imagined sound - can be identified as a hidden history of otherwise silent media. A profound engagement with sound runs through human culture and yet in many cases that engagement goes unrecognised. Neglect invariably engenders a counter movement, so sound and silence (even noise) can be idealised as the most pure and positive of sensory impressions. This reduces the fullness of sound and ignores its darker attributes as a trespasser, an invader of territory, an agent of instability. This is David Toop's most philosophical book. It's also his most literary, artistic, and scientific work to date, a work that looks at novels, poems, paintings, and myriad other sources to examine the peculiar nature of sound and its relationship to the other senses. It's a meditation on the art of listening - about how it connects us with the world, and about those aspects of the world that seem entirely disconnected from it.