"Sounding Islam investigates the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media, the anthropology of semiotic mediation, and sound studies. Based on long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores …
The essays collected here raise a simple but rarely asked question: just what, exactly, is voice? From this founding question, many others proliferate: Is voice an animal category, as Aristotle thought? Or is it distinctively human? Is it essentially related to language? To musi…
An exploration of how the singing voice figures in the negotiation of identity, Multivocality focuses on transitions and transgressions across genre and gender boundaries, cultural borders, the lines between body and technology, religious contexts, and found voices and lost ones.
"Voice connects our embodied existence with the theoretical worlds we construct. This book argues that the voice is a crucial element of mortal identity in the tragedies of Aeschylus. It first presents conceptions of the voice in ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, understandin…
The universality of musical tones has long fascinated philosophers, scientists, musicians, and ordinary listeners. Why do human beings worldwide find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out of the billio…
