Media and Sonic Self-Control. Durham

摘要

My pre-writing ritual starts with the selection of the perfect acoustic space. The site must be relatively quiet so I can concentrate, not a busy restaurant or my home where ringing telephones and barking dogs pull me away from writing. But, the space can't be library quiet either, where the stillness suffocates creativity. I usually settle on an under-used coffee shop, a place with at least a hum of activity - papers rustling, coffee grinding, and people murmuring. After I open up my laptop, I pop two foam earplugs into my ears to mute ever so slightly the sounds that surround me - and then I'm ready to write. In his enlightening new book, Hush - Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019), Mack Hagood examines how we wrestle with our own acoustic environments to produce certain affects and the reverberations of those efforts to quiet our surroundings and inevitably our own minds.