Noise Matters

"The originality of Hainge's work is in its philosophical method...He systematically unpacks noise to reveal its complexity, and its materiality in the virtual and actual worlds. Traversing many rich and wide-ranging topics, his book moves beyond the potential traps of falling into truisms, offering a highly nuanced reading of noise in all its materializations." --Sally MacArthur, University of Western Sydney, Australia

"Across eight chapters, Hainge runs through an irregular but illuminating sequence of cultural situations and texts in which noise proves determining [...]Hainge's study responds to the institutional unmooring of cultural studies with recourse to 'ontology'. What makes his book a more interesting study than many of the other 'ontologies' currently on offer is that, rather than promulgating a return to (low-grade phantasy) objects, Hainge focuses on the anti-object par excellence, the nothing that is noise. Now that's a noise we can all feel, if not in the way Slade intended." --Justin Clemens, Cultural Studies Review

"When I taught my first sound studies survey in 2005, the number of booksavailable was quite small and the field felt, for lack of a better word, largely'knowable.' In the decade since, a stunning range of new offerings from a variety of publishers has become readily available, and sound studies is a far more expansive discipline. This fact is nowhere more evident than in Bloomsbury Academic's excellent sound studies catalog ... the scholarship here shows how adept the cultural study of sound can be at unearthing the thorny political and social tensions that define contemporary culture." --Nicholas C. Laudadio, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Journal of Popular Music Studies