Just Beyond Listening asks how we might think about encounters with sound that complicate standard accounts of aurality. It considers how sound functions in dialogue with a range of sensory and affective modalities, including physical co-presence, textual interference, and spectral haunting. A series of essays investigates sound that is experienced in other parts of the body; altered by cross-wirings of the senses; weaponized by the military; or mediated and changed by cultural practices and memory. Building upon recent scholarship in sound studies and affect theory, Michael C. Heller’s latest work questions not only how sound propagates acoustically but how sonic presences temper our total experience of the world around us.
