Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound

Description

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.Cover photograph courtesy of Andrew Davidhazy.

Shelley Trower is Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Hull, UK.

"This book is remarkable not only for the range of its research, extraordinary though that is. It is even more impressive because of its capacity to stir its readers into genuinely imaginative thinking, a rare feat in a work of such scholarship. If we believe Charles Babbage, 'aerial pulses, unseen by the keenest eye' make of the very air around us 'one vast library' of all that has been said and done in the world. Senses of Vibration is certainly a major contribution to that library of the imagination." - Professor Philip Davis, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, University of Liverpool. "In Senses of Vibration Shelley Trower has cracked the historical equation of what happens when energy meets mass at the speed of sound. She describes a remarkable place where physics, physiology, media, aesthetics and daily life pool and interfere with one another. She details the things that have moved people through the energies moving through them, whether trapped in refined sensibilities, scintillating into ethereal wavescapes, throbbing in a protoplasmic trance-n-dance, or shaking bodies apart with accelerating shocks of modernity. All here in these pages, vibrating." -Douglas Kahn, National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.