Animal Musicalities Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening

About this book

Over the past century and a half, the voices and bodies of animals have been used by scientists and music experts as a benchmark for measures of natural difference. Animal Musicalities traces music's taxonomies from Darwin to digital bird guides to show how animal song has become the starting point for enduring evaluations of species, races, and cultures. By examining the influential efforts made by a small group of men and women to define human diversity in relation to animal voices, this book raises profound questions about the creation of modern human identity, and the foundations of modern humanism.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1 Why Do Birds Sing? And Other Tales

IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, KNOWLEDGE
2 Collecting Silence: The Sonic Specimen
3 Collecting Songs, Avian and African
4 Songs on the Dissecting Table

POSTMODERN HUMANITY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND PARADISE
5 Postmodern Humanity
6 Listening for Objectivity
7 The Rose Garden

The Animanities
Bibliography

Customer Reviews

Biography

Rachel Mundy is an assistant professor of music in the arts, culture, and media program at Rutgers University in Newark. She specializes in twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies. Mundy's current work relocates contemporary posthumanism and critical philosophy as the refrain of a century-long encounter with changing boundaries between species, race, and culture.