Hush

Reviewed by: Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control by Mack Hagood Andrea F. Bohlman (bio) Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control By Mack Hagood. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 276. One resounding refrain of the home-office videoconference in 2020 and 2021 is surely the command, "Unmute yourself!" The directive uses sound to clue a speaker into a communication breakdown precipitated by a counterintuitive conversation interface, inviting the individual to take control—clicking unmute, pressing a magic key combination—so that they can be heard. Videoconferencing software mixes a range technologies to control and cancel out the noisy chaos of ambient environments, human (and animal) bodies, and improvised dialog. With Hush, Mack Hagood provides a theoretical framework for understanding the significance of sound in producing affect and enabling labor in such contexts. The potentials of sonic mediation and remediation connect the six historical and ethnographic case studies of the book—each chapter focusing on an example of what Hagood terms "orphic media." Orphic media, like the mythical Greek musician-priest, Orpheus, singing and playing his lyre so that he might safely navigate past the Sirens by drowning them out in sound, use sound to counter sound and control affect. Across Hush, Ha-good analyzes the desire for orphic media, from noise-cancelling headphones to sound machines, as a product of society's economic and political demands. The author embraces these technologies for their lack of "con-tent" in order to push back against info-centric approaches to media by scholars. For example, he shows that users value the mobile phone apps that deliver rainforest sounds on loop because of the calming effect produced by material sound, not the harmonious biodiversity they sample (ch. 4). Hush's disciplinary home is sound studies, but Hagood brings methods and debates from media studies, disability studies, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science to his work. He offers a remarkable ethnography of people suffering from tinnitus and the audiologists who treat them (ch. 1). The fears sufferers face as they navigate disability emerge as agentive forces, orienting the reader to the sensory entanglement of the self and environment that is so crucial to the book's argument. Hagood then situates the problem of sonic self-control in the postwar United States across three orphic media that mask environmental sound by making other sound (ch. 2, 3, 4). Hagood explores the historical development, patenting, and branding of a whooshing device, the Sleepmate, to show how electromechanical noise was mollified and feminized as a domestic caretaker (ch. 2). Next, he uses a case study—a 1970s record series, environments—to underscore that orphic media are space-making (ch. 3). The series' producer, Irv Teibel, invited listeners to hear, but not listen closely to, forests, oceans, and other natural environments in their own homes. The records' most valued [End Page 1280] psychological effect, which Hagood asserts through analysis of user feedback and Teibel's cybernetic-inspired marketing, was that the sounds mediated new worlds and senses of self. Hagood then sharpens his critique of info-centrism through a focus on twenty-first century apps that build upon the media of the previous two chapters (ch. 4). The users of orphic apps prize sound—it is almost irrelevant whether the sounds are the nocturnal mating calls of frogs or clattery coffee shop ambience—as a means of "managing [their] informatic hygiene" (p. 162). Hagood compares and contrasts the historical situation of two brands of headphones—Bose and Beats by Dre—to suggest the social consequences of the thirst for sonic self-control (ch. 5 and ch. 6). The disorienting fear of tinnitus has become a more general anxiety about living in society. Hagood interrogates orphic media's utilitarian premise to reveal his case studies as fundamentally raced and classed. Both headphone sets celebrate noise-cancellation technology along with the distance users experience between themselves and other humans. Bose marketing posits high-end technology as a solution for the presumptively white business traveler, who cannot leave behind work for the real world, even while on an airplane. The Beats headset, Hagood shows, was advertised specifically to a range of Black users, whose embodied experiences with noisy racial

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Happening · Media studies · Mediation · Performance art · Silence · Social science · Sociology · History of Science and Medicine