Benjamin Tausig

Assistant Professor of Music

New book out January 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 as they finish production). The audio edition will include the complete book, narrated by 18 different readers, with field recordings and other exemplary audio interspersed. It is part audio book, part podcast. Please enjoy in tandem with the print version, and distribute freely.

INTRODUCTION: Sound, Protest Space, & Constraint (listen now)
Chapter 1 Completely Packed In (listen now)
Chapter 2 Red Sunday: Power and Connections
Chapter 3 Atrocity Broadcasts
Chapter 4 Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity
Chapter 5 Megaphone Singing
Chapter 6 The 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 courses in sound studies and ethnomusicology, and research sound and dissent in Southeast Asia and the United States. I am currently writing about not listening, or aural refusal, and in a separate project am studying the development of the city of Bangkok in the late 1960s, when that city was a major R&R site for U.S. soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. For the latter project, I’m investigating musical and sonic correspondences between U.S soldiers and Thai people, including musicians and sex workers.

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)

“Climates of Dissent,” in Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (Oxford University Press)

2018

“Sound and Movement: Vernaculars of Sonic Dissent,” Social Text 36(13) (September)

2017

“The Limits of Resistance,” Modernism/Modernity (“In These Times” series)

2016

“This is What It Sounds Like … On Prince (1958-2016) and Iterpretive 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