Benjamin Tausig
Assistant Professor of Music
New book out February 2019:
Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint
Listen to the audio edition of “Bangkok Is Ringing” at the links in the TOC below (chapters available on a rolling basis, as they finish production). The audio edition will include the complete text of the book, narrated by 18 different readers, with field recordings and other audio interspersed. It is a podcast/audiobook hybrid. Please enjoy in tandem with or instead of the print version, and distribute freely.
AUDIO EDITION (brief guide to the audio edition)
INTRODUCTION: Sound, Protest Space, & Constraint (listen now)
Chapter 1 Completely Packed In (listen now)
Chapter 2 Red Sunday: Power and Connections (listen now)
Chapter 3 Atrocity Broadcasts (listen now)
Chapter 4 Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity (listen now)
Chapter 5 Megaphone Singing
Chapter 6 Megaphonic Somsak Sangkaparicha Comes by His Goddamn Self
Chapter 7 A Quiet Mourning: The Poetry of Dynamics
Chapter 8 Whistles
Chapter 9 Vehicular Stereo Systems
Chapter 10 Developing Musical Economies I: CD Vendors
Chapter 11 Developing Musical Economies II: Stage Musicians
Chapter 12 Spontaneous Chants
Chapter 13 Developing Musical Economies III: Mr. Bear
Chapter 14 Surveillance
Chapter 15 Outer Space
Chapter 16 The Vanishing Point
Conclusion: On Mediated Spatiality
About the author
I teach in sound studies and ethnomusicology, and research sound and dissent in Southeast Asia and the United States, at Stony Brook University. I am currently researching the musical cosmos of Thailand during the Vietnam War, including the largely-forgotten (though no less astounding) American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, who lived in Bangkok for fifteen years. Here is one of Rocco’s videos, a Soundie filmed in 1943. I’m currently re-reading Ara Wilson’s Intimate Economies of Bangkok, which has been influential to me for years, and thinking anew about *intimacy* as a framework for studying history across scales of engagement — person-to-person, state-to-state, human-to-object, individual-to-structure, and so on. Not only do these scales involve different kinds of intimacy, but sometimes intimacies affect intimacies at different scales, such as when a diplomatic alliance makes a romantic relationship possible.
Recent Publications
2019
Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford University Press)
“The Spoiled and the Salvaged: Modulations of Auditory Value in Bangalore, India and Bangkok, Thailand” (co-authored with Michele Friedner), in Remapping Sound Studies, Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds. (Duke University Press)
“Introduction: At Risk of Repetition,” in “Women’s March Colloquy,” Music & Politics 8(1) (Winter 2019).
“The Audible Future,” in Journal of Popular Music Studies 31 (2) (2019).
“Climates of Dissent,” in Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
2018
“Sound and Movement: Vernaculars of Sonic Dissent,” Social Text 36(13) (September)
2017
“The Limits of Resistance,” Modernism/Modernity (“In These Times” series)
“Mysterious Sounds and Scary Illnesses,” New York Times (with Lisa Diedrich). October 10, 2017.
2016
“This is What It Sounds Like … On Prince (1958-2016) and Interpretive Freedom,” Sounding Out!
“A Division of Listening: Insurgent Sympathy and the Sonic Broadcasts of the Thai Military,” positions: asia critique 24(2)
2014
“Neoliberalism’s Moral Overtones: Music, Money, and Morality at Thailand’s Red Shirt Protests,” Culture, Theory and Critique 55(2)
Upcoming and Recent Courses at Stony Brook University
Fall 2018
MUS109 Rock, Pop Music, and Society
MUS541 Current Topics in Music and Electricity
Spring 2018
MUS451 Introduction to Ethnographic Methods in Music
MUS537 Baggage: Ethics in Ethnographic Research
Fall 2017
MUS109 Rock, Pop Music, and Society
MUS536 Bodies and Sex in Electronic Music
Spring 2017
MUS541 Aural Refusal: Theories of Refusal
and Resistance by Ear
MUS311 Hearing Politics