Scholars have long understood Manuel Puig’s work as embedded in media history, as he reinvented the novel by adapting techniques from film, radio-novelas, and soap operas. Critics like Alan Pauls linked gossip to the media circuitry of Puig’s first novel, while Josefina Ludmer wrote of how radio-novelas pertain to the “justice of the kitchen knife” in Boquitas Pintadas, and Francine Masiello discussed the relationship between invertido and inversión that Puig plots in entangling sexuality, media, and neoliberal capital. This chapter deepens Puig’s media history with special attention to sound across Puig’s novels, but with a particular focus on El beso de la mujer araña (1976). That novel has been hailed for its cinematic flair, but critics have tended to ignore the importance of listening in the book: from Puig’s own tape-recorded interviews in preparing the manuscript to Molina’s listening as an agent of the state to the shared listening that brings the characters together. Drawing from work on “aurality” by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Jonathan Sterne, and others, this chapter explains and analyzes how listening became Puig’s queer response to authoritarian power and the media technologies of his day.

Reflecting the turn in colonial literary scholarship towards performance in relation to sound studies, this chapter examines poetry as a form of poesis that emerged as an aural aesthetic category in colonial Mexico. Taking into consideration sociocultural factors, including language, class, and caste, and the evangelizing impetus of much religious music, this exploration of sounded lyric verse explains how these forms were not limited to church settings and places, nor to colonizing sources. The chapter considers poetry as a prestige form in music, the presentation of lyric in public musical settings, and the importance of aural aesthetics to convey poesis as a performative aesthetic category of cultural belonging. Musical poetic texts examined include the romance, villancico, church music, and other popular forms of autochthonous lyrical verse. Finally, the chapter considers the continuation of poetic aural performance through the nineteenth century.

In considering the uses of the lectionary by readers, this chapter focuses on the effect that the sound and acoustics of the readings’ chanting had in the space of a church like Hagia Sophia. By looking not only at ritual but also the architecture and decoration of the church, the chapter argues that the decoration of churches and the uses of the Gospel lectionaries responded to one another. Focusing on the plaque above the Imperial Doorway, for example, we see a place where an abridged lectionary is depicted, citing Gospel readings and also omitting key words, which the manuscripts show us were to be given sonic emphasis by chanters. Therefore, the argument is that architectural decorations in the church played with the impact and delivery of the chanted Gospels in order to reflect on the salvation that the readings conveyed and guaranteed to the faithful.

Theatre almost always involves sound-making of some sort, from the stage and from the audience, and even in the absence of designed, intentional sound the ambient environment may still produce something to hear. This chapter introduces some key topics in the academic study of theatre sound, referring to a variety of scholarly texts in this area of specialisation. Topics addressed include the scripting of sound and silence in dramatic texts; designed and circumstantial elements of theatre sound; the acoustical design of theatre buildings; voice and speech; audiences’ aural experiences; and soundscapes of the theatrical past. This conceptual overview is supplemented by a short analysis of a recent example of sonically inventive theatre by Complicite/Simon McBurney called The Encounter, in which audience members use headphones to listen to a performance that prominently features recorded, binaural sound and live-sound making. This case study, which resonates with many elements of theatre sound studies discussed in this chapter, demonstrates how sonic analysis of contemporary theatre may be conducted and what can be learned from this type of analysis.