Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is a personal, intimate act. It can also be a powerful way in which people open up to others and share collective memories. In religious settings such as Tibetan chanting, humming offers a mesmerising sonic experience. Then there are hums that resound regardless of human activity, such as the hums of impersonal objects and man-made or natural phenomena.
The first sound studies book to explores the topic of humming, Humming offers a unique examination of the polarising categories of hums, from hums that are performed only to oneself, that are exercised in religious practice, that claim healing, and that resonate with our bodies, to hums that can drive people to madness, that emanate from cities and towns, and that resound in the universe. By acknowledging the quirkiness of hums within the established discourse in sound studies, Humming takes a truly interdisciplinary view on this familiar yet less-trodden sonic concept in sound studies.
About the Author
Suk-Jun Kim is Lecturer in Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art and Programme Director of MMus in Sonic Arts at the University of Aberdeen, UK. As a composer and sound artist, Suk-Jun Kim has been exploring the sense of place through his composition and sound installation. His recent publication,
Hasla (2011), documents his work based on a short story,
Tails, which he has written, as well as writings by three renowned theorists and composers (Denis Smalley, Folkmar Hein, and Julia H. Schröder).
Kim's research interest includes imaginal listening, phenomenological approaches to listening and composing, new approaches to sound and place, and slowness and boredom as artistic processes, the last of which has led him to conduct extremely slow soundwalks on high streets in Scotland. Kim's work has been awarded first prizes at Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition, Metamorphoses in Belgium, and CIMESP. He was a resident composer fellow at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme in 2009.
Industry Reviews
Hmmm. Your lips are sealed and your mouth is closed, and yet you have a voice. Whence does it come? How can it be both sonorous and silent? By what means does it overflow a body that has turned in on itself? How can it hang in the air? This is not just a book about humming. Rather, Suk-Jun Kim uses the hum to penetrate the cracks in the very surface of existence. In so doing, he offers a profound meditation on the phenomena of language, voice and being. * Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK *
In Humming Suk-Jun Kim investigates a sounding practice beyond artistic research, although the book originated in a sound art project. Probing the sound and the phenomenon of the hum with phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, he opens up a philosophical perspective, neither eschewing further-reaching arguments, psychoanalysis, nor poetic passages. This concise study gives food for thought to artists and academics. * Julia Schroeder, Researcher at ARS - Cupras, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany *
From hum collecting in the field, via Cage, Calvino, Kafka, Tarkovsky and Prime Minister David Cameron, and elaborated through the discourse of psychoanalysis, Suk-Jun Kim personably and eruditely shows us that the humming of ourselves and others, a universally familiar yet furtive phenomenon, offers a nuanced opening for sound studies and the study of the voice - there is nothing humdrum about humming. * John Drever, Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *
Humming is ubiquitous, yet its meaning and significance has received little attention by scholars of sound. All that changes with Suk-Jun Kim's Humming. In this slim but tightly-argued volume, Kim explicates humming through a critical and psychoanalytic lens. The result is a lucid yet intricate account of humming's deceptive simplicity. * Brian Kane, Associate Professor of Music, Yale University, USA, and author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014) *
