There are sonic experiences that can’t be contained by the word “listening.” Moments when sound overpowers us. When sound is sensed more in our bodies than in our ears. When sound engages in crosstalk with our other senses. Or when it affects us by being inaudible. Dr. Michael Heller’s new book Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter (2023, U of California Press) uses affect theory to open up these moments. In this conclusion to our miniseries on sound and affect, we explore topics such as the measurement and perception of loudness, the invention of sonar and the anechoic chamber, and Heller’s critique of the politics of silence in the work of John Cage. This interview was a blast–Michael is a great storyteller and we had a lot of laughs. 

Dr. Michael Heller is a musicologist, ethnomusicologist, and a jazz scholar. This fall he will join the musicology faculty of Brandeis University as an Associate Professor, after working for ten years at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael’s love for music began with playing saxophone in his youth, but his path took an academic turn during college at Columbia University. There, he dove deep into jazz history while working at WKCR radio under the mentorship of legendary programmer Phil Schaap.

Michael’s scholarly pursuits were further shaped by his work with the Vision Festival, an avant-garde jazz festival in New York. Inspired by the experimental musicians he met there, he wrote his first book, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (2017, UC Press), documenting the 1970s scene where adventurous artists staged performances in old factory spaces. Through his immersion in these innovative communities, Michael developed a keen interest in the borderlands between music and sound. 

Just Beyond Listening pushes out into the borderlands of sound itself, using affect theory to probe how sound is perceived in other parts of the body, how sound interacts with written text, how it’s weaponized by the military, and how it can haunt us in mediated form.

To hear the extended version of this interview, including a segment on Louis Armstrong and Miachel’s “What’s Good” recommendations, sign up for a free or paid Patreon membership at patreon.com/phantompower.

See also: 

Part One of this miniseries on sound and affect: Noise and Affect Theory (Marie Thompson).
Mack’s own audio essay on John Cage and the anechoic chamber.

Mack Hagood  00:00

Hey, everyone, it’s Mack. Before we get started, I have a quick request. I am going up for full professor and this podcast is going to be a part of my argument that I’ve been making a scholarly contribution to my field. And part of that argument will be that people are using this podcast in the classroom. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they use episodes of this show in their classes. 

I’m asking right now, if you could just send me a quick email if you are such a person who uses Phantom Power in any kind of educational setting to teach anything to anyone as a kind of homework or what have you. If you could just send me a quick email. Let me know any details. You’re willing to share your name, your university’s name, the name of the class, You know, maybe how many years you’ve used it, as few or as many details as you’d care to share, I would be so grateful if you could just take that time. I know everyone’s super busy.

 But it would be great for me to have that information. As I go up for full professor. You can reach me at [email address]. Thanks so much. 

Introduction  01:24

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood  01:50

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. Today, we conclude a mini series on sound and affect. Our guest today is Michael Heller, a musicologist and ethnomusicologist at the University of Pittsburgh, and author of the new book Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter. 

Two weeks ago, Marie Thompson and I walked through Spinoza and Deleuze’s theories of affect and discussed how those theories can give us a different understanding of noise. Beyond the aesthetic moralism that tends to portray noise as something inherently bad and harmful, or something inherently transgressive and revolutionary. Our perception of noise or any sound is never purely the result of vibrations in the air, nor purely the result of our culturally conditioned ideas about sound. Noise emerges in the feedback loops that occur between the material and the social. 

And speaking of feedback, we got so much positive response to that episode, we got a whole lot of new patrons, who signed up either as free members or paid members to hear part two of my interview with Marie Thompson, in which we discuss tinnitus and an effect. 

Today we are building on those episodes with this fascinating interview with Michael Heller. Michael’s love for music began with playing saxophone in his youth, but his path took an academic turn during college at Columbia University. There he dove deep into jazz history while working at WKCR Radio under the mentorship of legendary programmer Phil Sharp. Michael’s scholarly pursuits were further shaped by his work with the Vision Festival, an avant garde jazz festival in New York. Inspired by the experimental musicians he met there, he wrote his first book Loft Jazz, documenting the 1970s scene where adventurous artists stage performances in old factory spaces. Through his immersion in these innovative communities, Michael developed a keen interest in the borderlands between music and sound. And his new book, Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter pushes out into the borderlands of sound itself, using affect theory to probe how sound is perceived in other parts of the body, how sound interacts with written text, how it’s weaponized by the military, and how it can haunt us in mediated form. In this interview, we discuss topics such as the measurement and perception of loudness, the invention of sonar in the anechoic chamber, and the politics of silence in the work of John Cage. 

This interview was a blast. Michael is a great storyteller, and we had a lot of laughs. And I asked Michael Heller to start off by telling a story that appears in the opening of his book, one that I found completely hilarious, but also, I found it to be a really powerful example of what Michael Heller calls a sonic encounter.

Michael Heller  05:02

So I was in Paris in 2007. And I was there, I was a grad student at the time. And I was privileged enough and lucky enough to get a fellowship to do an intensive language study. So I ended up spending a lot of my time just sort of walking around the city and exploring and seeing what I could. And so one day I’m doing this, it’s a sunny afternoon. It’s gorgeous outside, and I accidentally stumbled across Notre Dame cathedral. And it’s immediately familiar, because we’ve all seen a million pictures of Notre Dame. 

So I say, Okay, let me go over and check it out. And it’s a lot of it is what you’d expect. It’s a very touristy area, there was sort of a concrete pavilion in front where some people are waiting in line, and some people are having picnics. And there’s some low hedges, where there’s a man feeding birds, you know, songbirds, they’re all very, very pleasant. I’m sort of very pleased that happened across this. And after a couple of minutes, it must have been the top of the hour because the Notre Dame bells begin to ring and they start and I sort of think, well, this is lovely. What else could you ask for? I’m a tourist in Paris, it’s a beautiful summer day, I’m gonna hear these bells. And I don’t know anything about the Notre Dame bells. At this point, I’m a jazz historian. 

This isn’t my area of expertise. But you know, I think I’ve heard church bells and know what to expect, there’s going to be some vocation of divine consonance and harmonic confluence and like a lovely pleasant thing to listen to, and sort of sort of sit back and getting ready for it. And as the bills begin to build, what I find is that the Notre Dame bells in 2007 were not that at all. They were very untuned in a certain sense, at least from from a Western perspective, which I much later learned was a criticism that people had, there were a lot of people that couldn’t stand the Notre Dame bells, and they replaced most of them later on in 2013. But at the time, it starts to build and there’s just this dissonance and this accretion of sound that sort of grows into a roar around me. And it takes me by surprise, I’m off guard, it’s incredibly loud, it sort of fills up everyone’s had that experience of having a body filled up with sound, and I’m feeling it in my chest and my teeth. 

And I’m trying to make sense of it. And, you know, I find myself thinking through like, Well, maybe if this is a religious evocation, it’s supposed to be like an angry old Testament God or something like that. I’m trying to make sense of it. But it’s really kidding me. You know, it’s, it’s getting me. And just as it sort of hitting its height, and I’m grappling with this, there’s this other layer that enters which enters as this rush of air and this flap of wings. And I look up and everyone’s ducking down, and the songbirds that were being fed on the hedge there have all taken