Brandon LaBelle Books

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and to be heard that extends toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining capacities of listening, leading to what LaBelle terms “poetic ecologies of resonance.” Acoustic Justice works at issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, by moving across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of Deaf voice. Through such transversality, LaBelle pushes for acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

In this second expanded edition, with a new chapter about the future of sound art, revisions to the text as well as a new preface by Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise follows the development of sound as an artistic medium, making the case that sound art should be at the core of contemporary culture.

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change.

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sound culture and acts of listening, and discusses how auditory studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture and auditory issues, Acoustic Territories opens up multiple perspectives - it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by unfolding auditory experience as located within larger cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces auditory life through a topographic structure: beginning with underground territories, through to the home as a site, and then further, to streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself. The new edition includes an additional “territory” of the geopolitical, as well as chapters updated throughout to include new technology and network culture. The book is fully updated to incorporate heavier theoretical and practical application, includes new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, and includes a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentiality inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

Expands understandings of voice to and the poetics of gibberish showing how speech is fundamentally shaped by the complex dynamics of the mouth..

An exploration of how sound permeates various aspects of life - from the streets to our homes, and from shopping malls to the underground. It provides a consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sound culture and acts of listening, and discusses how auditory studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society.