Chapter 1 will examine the ontological and epistemological questions surrounding music in the knowledge system of the medieval Islamic world by exploring the philosophical system of Ibn Sina and his later followers, all of whose works laid the foundations for scholars of music in the centuries to come. In particular, I will address how mathematics was conceptualized vis-à-vis the cosmology of the falsafa tradition as the discipline that examined the existents whose existence was dependent on physical matter but could be conceptualized without the said matter. Through this conceptualization of music and mathematics, scholars of music were able to broaden their subject matter to cover topics from the melodic modes in vogue in their time to the poetics of music. At the same time, since everything in the universe was connected to one another, music was linked with many other scientific disciplines such as astronomy and medicine.

Chapter 6 discusses the definitions of ratios and intervals as different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between musical notes. Here, the author’s main interest lies in the two different ways in which the ancient Greek scholars of music, the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians, conceptualized the relationship between any given two notes. While the former understood notes as equal to numbers and thus conceptualized the relationship in the form of a numerical ratio, the latter understood them as points on a continuum and thus perceived the relationship as a geometrical distance between the two points on a scale. A third group of Greek scholars, the later Neoplatonic scholars, tried to reconcile the two approaches into a synthesis. It was this synthesis that Islamic scholars inherited during the medieval period.

Chapter 7 will examine the question of consonance and dissonance of musical ratios and intervals in the medieval Islamic world and the growing importance of the human soul in the discussions pertaining to this question. The Pythagoreans, having conceptualized the relationship between two notes as a numerical ratio, insisted that the key to consonance and dissonance lay in the mathematical neatness of these ratios. The Aristoxenians, however, insisted that consonance and dissonance were a matter of human experience. A third group of synthesizers emerged that aimed at reconciling the two approaches: Neoplatonic philosophers. Inheriting the works of these philosophers, scholars of music in the Islamic world set about the task of explaining the mechanisms of apprehension of consonance by human ears according to mathematical rules. In this process, the role of the soul as the link between humanity and the cosmos – with its mathematical underpinnings – gradually grew in emphasis.

Chapter 2 will begin by emphasizing the role of elite patrons in the production of educational treatises on the science of music. The chapter will then provide an analysis of the relationship between learning the science of music, and musical practice, including performance, poetic skills, and listening to music. After providing some medieval philosophical arguments regarding the necessity of learning the science of music in order to better appreciate music performance, the chapter pivots toward presenting the sociocultural benefits of learning the science itself, especially among the elite of the city of Baghdad between third/ninth–seventh/thirteenth centuries. Through aphorisms and entertaining anecdotes by famous Baghdadi literati such as Ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Sarakhsi, and al-Tawhidi, I demonstrate how knowledge about music – as opposed to art-music itself – was used by the elite as a social currency to gain access to certain social circles that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to them.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences; in fact, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. Focusing on the science of music this book discusses how a non-European premodern intellectual tradition – in this case, the Islamic philosophical tradition – conceptualized science. Furthermore, it explores how this intellectual tradition produced “correct” scientific statements and how it envisioned science’s relationship with other bodies of knowledge. Finally, it investigates what made music a science in the medieval Islamic world by examining the ontological debates surrounding the nature of music as a scientific discipline as well as the epistemological tools and techniques that contributed to the production of musical knowledge during the medieval period (third/ninth–ninth/fifteenth centuries).

Chapter 3 offers a sustained reading of the nature of auditory perception in George Eliot’s Middlemarchin order to demonstrate the significance of listening and attentiveness not only to the pathological sounds of the body but to those metaphoric heart beats and vibrations that signify psychological struggles within the novel as a whole. In Eliot’s realist project, I argue, both medical and imaginative explorations of the vibrations and pulses beyond the thresholds of usual human ‘stupidity’ and sensory perception are stimulants to the imagination, but they are not a cause for horror or dread like those gothic treatments of the stethoscope discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, they offer an opportunity for cultivating medical knowledge, sympathy, and humility. Here, attentive, stethoscopic listening ultimately provides a means of discrimination, of knowing and orienting oneself, and of relating to others in the modern world.

Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

Started higher training in general adult psychiatry. Pregnant again and our third daughter was born in the summer. I had a year’s maternity leave and returned to work part-time. I decided to train in addictions as well as general adult psychiatry.

This chapter discusses how historical exchanges with Makassan and other seafaring peoples from beyond the Arafura Sea remain a profound influence on Yolŋu music and culture that endures to this day. We explore how Yolŋu people, through their enduring ceremonial traditions, elaborately integrate song, dance and design elements to recount exchanges with Makassan seafarers, the boats in which they sailed, and the goods they carried. We also discuss how, since the mid-1980s, this autonomous history of Yolŋu exchanges with foreigners has been remembered and continues to inspire new forms of Yolŋu cultural expression that overtly reach out across cultures. Our approach is informed by our long history of researching Yolŋu song in all its forms and working together to document the Yolŋu public ceremonial song tradition known as manikay. Garawirrtja’s expertise is further grounded in his extensive training and practice as a Yolŋu elder and ceremonial singer of the manikay tradition, who maintains hereditary songs that recount Yolŋu contact histories with Makassan and other seafarers.

This article explores the importance of music to Australian Torres Strait Islanders, in their home islands and on the Australian mainland, for maintaining and sustaining connections with the historical traditions of the Torres Strait region in far northern Queensland. Beginning post-World War Two, there was a sizeable diaspora to the Australian mainland and also the gradual unravelling of race-based laws aimed at controlling the travels and personal lives of Islanders, and Aboriginal peoples. Because of the diaspora, there were some changes in Islander sociality and culture over time, place and situation, in particular regarding performance and performativity. However, aspects of Islander music practices remain similar to what had occurred traditionally, but with some modifications via adoptions, adaptations and innovations befitting new social, cultural and economic environments. This article concludes with discussion of how traditional practices have contributed to contemporary Islander music variously as culture, commerce and creativity.

This chapter examines the current state of jazz in Australia through the lens of notable practitioners—Andrea Keller, Simon Barker, Gian Slater, Kristin Berardi, Phil Slater and Jamie Oehlers. Presented as a panel discussion, the participants explore the term ‘jazz’ as it is perceived both by audiences and the practitioners themselves, discuss the challenges of presenting original music in a country as isolated as Australia, and question whether there is an audible Australian jazz ‘dialect’.

For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.