Noise, Tinnitus and Affect Theory: Marie Thompson Extended Interview Recast)

While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with the influential theorist of noise and affect theory, Dr. Marie Thompson. This episode features 40 minutes of additional content on Thompson’s research on tinnitus and hearing loss. To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com.

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect.

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox. And if you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry—we break it down!

Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

Cited Media:

Books:

• Steve Goodman - Sonic Warfare (2010)

• Marie Thompson & Ian Biddle (eds.) - Sound, Music, Affect (2013)

• Marie Thompson - Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (2017)

• Jacques Attali - Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985)

• Michel Serres - The Parasite (1980)

• R. Murray Schafer - The Tuning of the World (1977)

• Anahid Kassabian - Ubiquitous Listening (2013)

• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - Extraordinary Bodies (1997)

• Eric Drott - Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (2024)

• Paul Rekret - Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (2024)

• Melinda Cooper - Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017)

• Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver - The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1998)

Articles / Journal Pieces:

• Marie Thompson - "Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies," Parallax (2017)

• Annie Goh - "Sounding Situated Knowledges," Parallax (2017)

• George Lewis - "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives" (2002)

• Christoph Cox - "Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics” Parallax (2017)

Journals:

• ⁠The Senses and Society: The Aesthetics of Tinnitus⁠

• ⁠Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry⁠

Chapters:

0:21 Intro
5:17 Introducing Marie Thompson
7:57 Liverpool music roots
10:38 PhD at Newcastle
14:55 Defining noise
20:38 Spinoza & affect
39:44 Materialism debate with Cox
47:57 Tinnitus
1:09:04 Tinnitus & ableism in sound studies
1:13:11 Normate listening
1:23:57 Closing thoughts
1:24:22 What's Good segment

To read the full transcript click here

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