“Sound and the public” offers an opportunity to reengage with longstanding questions about music, democracy, and the public sphere in light of new disciplinary configurations, modes of analysis, and political configurations. While there is a robust literature on music and public life, addressing topics from urban public concerts to protest movements, only recently has attention turned to a more general consideration of sound. At the same time, the conceptual turn toward materiality, sensation, and affect opens new modes of investigation of the formation of publics and public life, something for which sound is well situated. And while tenets of liberal democracy tend to still hold as aspirational and defining characteristics of public life, in the current global political climate the nature and meaning of the public might be fundamentally altered—this we have yet to see. An inquiry into “sound and the public” is prismatic, approachable from multiple perspectives. Here, the intent is to understand current configurations of the public as lived, imagined, and sensed through sound. In their attenuations with “the public,” sonic materiality and sound as signifying meet, as a seeming openness and generalizability that is idealized as everyone vibrating together may also carry normative impulses in which mappings of sound and social groups divide rather than unify. We invited submissions by pointing to this potential with two broad questions: How does a public organize itself acoustically—through listening, feeling, or orienting toward one another? And how does sound serve as force, object, or “actant” in composing publics? The resulting contributions address these questions and more, indicating the ways in which, while something coheres in this framework, more is left unresolved, with sound and the public both unstable categories. Sound and the public: Introduction to Special Issue

中文翻译：

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声音与公众：特刊简介

“声音与公众”提供了一个机会，可以根据新的学科结构，分析模式和政治结构，重新参与有关音乐，民主和公共领域的长期问题。尽管有大量关于音乐和公共生活的文献，涉及从城市公共音乐会到抗议运动的话题，但直到最近才将注意力转向对声音的更一般的考虑。同时，从概念上向物质性，感觉和情感的转变为研究公众和公众生活的形成开辟了一种新的方式，对公众而言，声音的定位是合理的。虽然自由民主主义的原则仍然仍然是公共生活的理想和定义特征，在当前的全球政治气氛中，公众的性质和意义可能会发生根本性的改变，这我们尚未看到。对“声音和公众”的询问是棱角分明的，可以从多个角度进行探讨。在这里，目的是通过声音了解生活，想象和感知的公众当前配置。声音的实质性和声音在其与“公众”的衰减中相遇，因为每个人在一起振动时理想化的开放性和可概括性也理想化，也可能带有规范冲动，其中声音和社会群体的映射是分开而不是统一的。我们通过以下两个广泛的问题来指出这种潜力来邀请作者：公众如何通过聆听，感觉或彼此定向来进行声音上的自我组织？声音如何充当力量，对象，或“演员”组成公众？由此产生的贡献解决了这些问题，甚至还解决了更多问题，这表明尽管在此框架中产生了一些凝聚力，但还有很多悬而未决的方法，声音和公众都是不稳定的类别。声音与公众：特刊简介