This document discusses opportunities for integrating printed text and audible sound in academic publishing. It argues that while publications have increasingly included some sound elements like embedded clips, text and sound have remained disconnected. New audio formats like podcasts and audiobooks allow text to be presented as sound itself, collapsing the distinction between analytical text and analyzed material. The author outlines adapting their own ethnographic work into an audio edition combining podcast and audiobook elements, with narrated text interwoven with field recordings. This format positions text and sound as equal partners that can speak directly to each other, moving beyond imperfect representations and allowing theory to be sounded.

1. 25
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The Audible Future
Mobilized by the new mediaformatsof the past several decades, publications in music
studies have steadily pushed toward the integration of printed text and audible sound.
However, this push has not yet delivered the kinds of integrated analytical
frameworks—printed text and sound speaking directly to one another—that it seems
to render possible, especially in scholarship.1 Of course, there have been many
enriching formats (blogs, podcasts, embedded sound clips in digital publications) in
the twenty-first century that did not exist in the twentieth. But the mingling of sound
or music with text has remained mostly out of sync with academic publishing, whose
proprietary and logistical constraints require compromise. In this essay, I trace some
routes through the contemporary technological thicket that might allow printed text
and audio media to work together in intellectually productive ways, and which
moreover the academic publishing industry can support. I outline one promising
formatin detail, although digital publishing in music and sound studies is an openfield
with many potential applications, so other formats are certainly possible. The
challenge will be different for those working in say, popular music studies compared
with those making ethnographic field recordings. But these fields of research are
similar enough that they can be discussed simultaneously.
To begin, a bit of history. Scholarly presses have in fact long sought to integrate
music and other kinds of sound with print-based publications. In the 1990s, presses
bound CDs inside the back covers of popular music and ethnomusicology books, as
they had done earlier to a more limited extent with cassettes and LPs. In the early
twenty-first century, publishers began to build password-protected websites where
audio material
†I thank Mary Francis, Suzanne Ryan, and Ken Wissoker for their kind input with parts of this article, as well
as
Robin James for attentive, insightful editing.
1. Dominic Boyer, James Faubion,
Cymene Howe, and Marcel LaFlamme,
“Sound + Vision: Experimenting with the
Anthropological Research Article of the
Future,” Cultural Anthropology 31/4 (2016):
459–63. Boyer et al. describe the relative
paucity of peer-reviewed journals that have
experimented with “multimodal” publication
formats. They offer the journal Vectors as one
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2. 26 JOURNAL OFPOPULAR MUSIC STUDIES JUNE 2019
exception;I note also e-misférica and Sensate as others that have experimented with the integration of media in
peer-reviewed scholarship.The Sounding Out! blog has been a major force for this kind of publishing in music
studies,without peer-review but with a wealth of other features.On the history and value of Sounding Out!, see
Aaron Trammell,Jennifer Lynn Stoever, and Liana Silva, “The Pleasure (Is) Principle:Sounding Out!and the
Digitizing of Community,” in Digital Sound Studies, ed. Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney
Trettien (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 83−119.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 31, Number 2, pp. 25–32. Electronic ISSN: 1533-1598 © 2019 by the
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved.Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproducearticle content through the University of California
Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI:
https://doi.org/ 10.1525/jpms.2019.312004
relevant to monographs or textbooks could be archived. But neither solution—
physical format or digital link—fulfilled the promise of the available media. In the CD
era, too much equipment had to be simultaneously at hand for text and sound to truly
work in tandem—how many readers carried portable CD players? And as one editor
at a university press noted, CDshad a frustrating tendency to get lost, especially library
copies. Even those discs that remained in the book would eventually degrade.
Compounding the problem, not all printing houses were willing to bind CDs, so if a
publisher switched printers, as became increasingly common with the advent of print-
on-demand, the publisher often needed to eliminate the musical supplement entirely.
Password-protected websites may make audio material more stable, but it is not clear
that this improves access for all readers. Printed (or even digital) books and online
archives remain awkward to use together. For many readers, sonic supplements to
music and sound studies publications have thus been too beset by technical hurdles
to be analytically essential to the books themselves. And perhaps because sound has
been broadly regarded as secondary to text (equally so in the Derridean sense and in
the publishing industry), and because presses lack resources to edit or review audio,
books in music and sound studies often come with low-quality, poorly organized
supplements.2 Meanwhile audio books, when created at all, are licensed to outside
companies or contractors, making them in effect a separate business. Text and sound
have grown closer over the decades, but in the domains of academic publishing and
popular music studies trade books, not quite close enough.
In some sense this is an old problem. Music-critical adjectives are never equal to
sound, as Roland Barthes noted. Many audiophiles spend their lives seeking a degree
of transparent sound reproduction that would obviate this issue, alas always in vain.
In the end it is death and taxes for music scholars: no language is so precise, no
inscriptive system so thorough, no audio tech so advanced that it can “capture” music
as a sonorous artifact without transforming it both sonically and ontologically.3 But if
one dispenses with the fantasy of perfect representation and thinks of text and sound
as dialogic partners, rather than distorted mirrors of each other, our contemporary
time (I write this in early 2019) may be felicitous. Today podcasts and audio books are
two formats that could be examined and emulated more widely by scholars and

3. Tausig | The Audible Future 27
presses. For in these, language itself is presented as sonorous, just like the stuff it
describes. The largely artificial distinction between analytical printed text and analyzed
sonic material collapses. Audio material, be it music or field recording, is not relegated
to being illuminated by the writing, but instead becomes an element of commentary
in its own right, speaking directly back to the text. In podcast and audio book formats
(and their kin), text and sound are no longer eternally imperfect transductions of each
other, but coequal partners.
Within this frame, I next explore some possibilities and implications of publishing
scholarship in sound in the early twenty-first century. By this I mean something
different from a Feldian “doing ethnography in sound,” however. Feld once asked,
‘‘What about
2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore,MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
3. FrancesDyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley, CA:
University of CaliforniaPress, 2009).
an anthropology of sound? What about ethnographies that are tape recordings?’’4
Doing ethnography in sound, for Feld, begins with the recognition that sonic poetics
are affective, and therefore irreducible to their interpretation. Sound ethnographies
might serve in place of textual analysis, communicating affect as well as (if done
thoughtfully) the structures of meaning that sound encodes. Simply put, Feldian
sound is an alternative to text; it speaks to a discrete plane of knowing and being in
the world. But certain limits remain. Recorded sound, like sound in any medium,
cannot re-present the affect that it tends to activate without further elaboration. This
circumstance is wholly familiar to anyone who has ever played a favorite song for
someone else, only to find that person unmoved. To suggest something non-
obvious about music or sound requires comment, explicit or otherwise. Music or
sound need not be understood as alternatives to text; the two work best when they
mingle and collaborate. Join Audible Free
What is promising about the audiotechnical present, then, is not merely that field
recordings can be made more accessible alongside explanatory text, nor (in a Feldian
register) that sound can supplant text, but in fact that text itself can now be easily
conveyed as sound. New media can usefully position text and audio material as
inseparable. Deborah Kapchan incisively asks, in her introduction to a recent edited
volume, “How might we not only write sound but sound theory differently?”5 Lingold,
Mueller, and Trettien similarly advocate “giving voice to thought” in their preface to
a new volume on digital sound studies.6 Heeding these imperatives—of sounding
theory, of voicing thought—ensures that we do not play Haravagian god tricks. We
ought not, in other words,confuse text foran objective, immaterial decoderofsound.
Even on the page, text is not metaphysical or abstract. In a podcast or similar format,
interpretive text is conveyed as a sonorous and aurally affective thing, experienced on
the same plane as musical examples or field recordings. We hear and are thus

4. 28 JOURNAL OFPOPULAR MUSIC STUDIES JUNE 2019
continually reminded that the text, too,is material. In such formats, theory is sounded,
thought is voiced, and much for the better.
During the past six months, I have adapted myownfirst ethnographic monograph,
called Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, into an audio edition that
combineselementsofpodcastandaudiobookformats.7
Thisadaptationstrivespartlytorepresent sound and sonic experience, to enable readers
to hear what it sounded like in the field. This has value. But more importantly, the
combination enmeshes analytical text (that is, the book, in narrated form) with the
audible material of fieldwork. It refuses the notion of the text as a bodiless entity,
making the text sonorous and also subjecting it to the effects of other sonorities. To
the extent that other authors might want to create similar adaptations with the
technology now available, I offer this essay as a partial guide for considering ethical,
economic, and production questions.
4. Steven Feld and Donald Brenneis, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,” American Ethnologist 31/4
(January 2008): 463.
5. Deborah Kapchan, ed., Theorizing Sound Writing (Middletown,CT:Wesleyan University Press, 2017),
17. (Emphasis mine).
6. Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, “Preface,” in Digital Sound Studies
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018): ix.
7. Benjamin Tausig, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (New York: Oxford University
Press,
2019). The audio edition is freely available at bentausig.com.
The structure of the audio edition of Bangkok Is Ringing mirrors that of the printed
book, with sound threaded throughout. Each chapter is read by a different narrator,
and once field recordings are added, made available as its own downloadable file.8
Using basic audio editing software, the narration track for each chapter is interwoven
with relevant field recordings and sounds.9 This might include, for example, a brief
snippet of a song after it is mentioned by the narrator, an ambience that plays during
the description of a scene of protest, or a few seconds of an instrument following a
discussion of that instrument’s timbre. Certain field recordings—especially
interviews—substitute directly for narrated quotations, augmenting the text of
remarks with the inflection, pacing, and sonority of the speaker. The audio edition is
still technically a monograph, but its singular voicing is fragmented. One sentence
reads, for example, “[narrator’s voice] Mae, for instance, enjoying no legitimate claim to
discursive public space, used the weak, oblique medium of the recorder to shout into
that space, saying almost whatever she pleased because she was powerless, and
experiencing no fearas a result: [Mae’s voice] Go ahead! I’m not afraid ofyoufuckers!”10
(See the online version of the journal to hear audio clip no.1) This format allows for
the fluid integration of authorial text and sound recording, even within the space of a
single sentence.
Such integration can enliven the text, give voice to more people, and do analytical
work.Butitalsoraisesethicalquestions.Namely,toreproducesomeone’srecordedvoiceis

5. Tausig | The Audible Future 29
quite different from quoting their words in print—the sound of speech can introduce
vulnerability. Especially because Bangkok Is Ringing is an ethnography of sound in
political conflict (Thailand’s recent, antigovernment “Red Shirt” movement), the
ethics of reproducing speech and other identifiable sound became a concern. Since
many ofmy interlocutors assumed grave political risk, not all spokenquotations could
be included safely in the audio edition. Just as the fraught relationship between people
and their words must be considered when writing a book or article, with anonymity
carefully preserved where necessary, an entirely new round of scrutiny was needed for
the audio edition. Vocal recordings add useful detail for scholars, but no less so for
cops.
Meanwhile, the narration process subjected the text itself to new questions, in ways
that were both useful and challenging. The following difficult issues arose, among
others:
Whowouldnarrateeachchapter?Whatkindofauthoritywouldbeassumedthroughspoken
narration, even beyond that of writing? And how would cited passages from external
sources within the text be spoken, as other people’s words were not only printed but
spoken? I do not have an easy solution to the last problem in particular. I invited all
authors
8. Stony Brook University musicology Ph.D. candidate Matthew Brounley expertly supervised the
recording ofthe narration.
9. No elaborate or expensive equipment—and no special knowledge—was requiredto create the audio
edition.Although I used a proprietary program called Logic to make each chapter, there are numerous free
programs (see https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-audio-editor for a partial recent list) that can
carry out all the necessary functions,and which can be learned quickly by beginners.Although more elaborate
options are available, the technical barrier to entry for producing afieldwork-enriched audio book is low.The
wisdom of using low-tech approaches is extolled by Jonathan Sterne, Darren Mueller,and Whitney Trettien in
their “Afterword” to the volume DigitalSound Studies. These three agree that platforms requiring minimal gear
tend to be more durable than those that rely upon complex tools and content management systems.
10. Translation mine.Her words were:“ไปเลย! ไม่กลวั มึง!”
cited in the book to record their own quotations, and offered to use these recordings
in lieu of the narrator’s voice, if the author wished. Many obliged, and the remote
recording process was explained so that it would be free, fast, and easy. But some
authors did not respond, did not want to participate, became busy after initially
agreeing, or weredeceased,to name just a few extenuating circumstances. This already
partial solution also butted up against the fact that not every figure in the book was
cited approvingly. Should an author be invited to record their own quotation if that
author is critiqued by the book’s
argument?Foreverywaythattheaudioeditionofthebookbroughttext,voice,andsound
into a richer dialogue, so too did it necessitate new ethical considerations around
representation. The shift in medium required an attendant shift in habits of etiquette
and professionalism.
Despite these challenges, the analytical moves that became possible by bringing
sound and narrated text together were significant. Chapter 2 of the monograph

6. 30 JOURNAL OFPOPULAR MUSIC STUDIES JUNE 2019
describes an older woman, Mae (the same person quoted above), who has a long
history of involvement in protest movements in Thailand. The chapter describes how
Mae’s self-identification as a political subject resonates with the life story of a
legendary pop singer named Pumpuang Duangjan. In the text, I relate an anecdote
about Mae singing Pumpuang’s music after dinner one night, as she spoke to a group
of friends about the experiences that had motivated her political engagements. In the
audio edition, I was not only able to thread Mae’s impromptu performance into the
narration, but at one point aligned some of Mae’s singing with a recording of
Pumpuang’s original recording of the same song, so that they were in effect singing
together. (See the online version of the journal to hear audio clip no.2) This alignment
underscores how Pumpuang served as both political and musical archetype for Mae,
a point made at length in the text and then reinforced poetically in the production.
There are further layers to this juxtaposition, one of which is that the narrator of the
chapter is Dr. Deborah Wong, one of my own mentors, whose ethnography of Thai
musical archetypes informed this section theoretically. Dr. Wong is cited directly in
the text, but she is also cited tacitly by this layering. In such instances, it became
possible to introduce meaningful analytical gestures that complemented or even
surpassed the narrated text. W.F. Hsu, in their writing on digital ethnography,
discusses the analytical value of using digital tools to reframe information in different
modes—for instance, looking at sound recordings as waveforms or through spectral
analysis.11 Hsu describes the patterns gleaned from old Taiwanese cassette recordings
by observing those recordings through the visual tools of a digital audio workstation.
Like Hsu, I discovered that narrating the written text of a monograph aloud, and
mingling it with the sound under discussion, reframed the material multimodally,
revealing relationships that were not possible through print alone.
There are compromisesin narrating text, as well,although creative producersmight
find ways to recover some of what is lost. For example, the audio edition of Bangkok
11. W.F. Hsu, “Digital Ethnography Toward Augmented Empiricism: A New Methodological
Framework,” JournalofDigitalHumanities3/1(Spring2014).http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-1/digital-
ethnography-towardaugmented-empiricism-by-wendy-hsu/.
Is Ringing contains almost no footnotes, except for a few that were essential to
understanding the argument oraction, and which weretherefore moved into the main
bodyforthenarratortoread.Apodcast-likeformat,withitssingular,contiguousnarrative
structure, offers no obvious outlet for footnotes, which in a printed book the reader
can choose to consult or not, either while they read or later on, and which they can
locate, navigate, or ignore easily. All that footnotes contain, by convention, from
minor asides to respectful citations of influential people or works, is sacrificed. In the
audio edition, I use
twodistinctbelltonestosignalthebeginningandendingofquotations.Butnoequivalent
type of signaling would make the inclusion of footnotes less clunky. Format

7. Tausig | The Audible Future 31
translations will not be a net positive in every respect, at least until a single audio
marking and navigation system is broadly adopted.
Still,thebenefitsofaudioeditionsofsoundandmusicscholarshipareclear.Andvitally,
traditional publishers can support them. Oxford University Press, for example,
reverted all audio rights for BangkokIs Ringing to me,and I agreed to make the narrated
chapters freely available. A free audio edition is likely to help advertise a book, and in
any case
publishersdonotregardaudioeditionsascompetitorsofprinteditions.Authorscantherefo
re approach audio versions of traditional monographs with a great deal of flexibility.
But should audio editions be separated from presses as a matter of course? After
all, my university paid for the production of my audio book, in effect, through a small
summer grant. But not all authors have access to institutional support. Moreover, as
one editor at an academic press told me in conversation, licensing of copyrighted
material has hardly been simplified by digital platforms, and questions of fair use
remain unsettled. (In my audio edition, I did not seek permission when using snippets
of copyrighted material, such as recorded songs, although I did endeavor to use short
segments where possible, as this may improve the case for fair use). If the production
cost and legal obstacles of creating audio editions de facto falls on institutions rather
than publishers, then independent and unstably employed scholars, as well as those
on the job market who lack institutional affiliation, may be burdened with
uncompensated additional labor as well as legal risk.12 The possibilities of audio
monographs are great, but some consideration of the labor market is
duebeforedivingintooenthusiastically.Wemustbeattentivetocertainquestions.Should
authors be expected to shoulder the burden of recording narration and producing
chapters on their own? What benefit would come to them for doing so, and how
might they be equitably supported? What benefits might come to presses if scholars
of music and sound were to create audio editions routinely, and what might they
therefore offer authors in return?
Text and sound have now, perhaps, reached a technological proximity that will
enable music scholars to integrate them in ways more satisfying and analytically useful
than in the
past.HereIhavedescribedonespecificformat,whichbringstextandsoundontothesame
medial plane so that scholarship can be “read” in a genuinely intermodal fashion, and
in ways that may be sustainable for academic presses. But in considering the path that
might
12. As Liana Silvatrenchantly puts it, in adiscussion of this problem,“how many sound studies scholars
canafford to do sound studies?” Trammel, et al., “The Pleasure (Is) Principle,” 86.
lead toward this and other new audible formats, I am reminded of an anecdote about
the radio production team the Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson), which
is pre-

8. 32 JOURNAL OFPOPULAR MUSIC STUDIES JUNE 2019
13 sented in the book
Recording Culture. Silva and Nelson once wanted to record the ambiences of a
pool hall. In their initial attempt to do so, they set up a mic and recorder and
adopted a hands-off approach, as recordists often do. But the results they got
were muddled, and did not express what they wanted when listening back. So
the duo returned to the pool hall, this time isolating specific sounds they
wished to highlight, then piecing
14 it all back together
artfully, in a “creative treatment of actuality”. The recognition that sound
does not speak for itself freed them to produce a more effective narrative
piece, guided more strongly by their own interpretive hand. This anecdote
may be an object lesson both for the production of audio editions of music
scholarship and for how we think about these works in the current publishing
and labor market. Text and sound have gotten closer and might soon join
with greater technical efficiency. But in order to work well, the process will
require stewardship, interpretation, and ethical care.
13. Daniel G. Makagon and Mark Neumann, Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic
Experience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,2009).
14. Makagon and Neumann, Recording Culture, 17.
REFERENCES
Boyer, Dominic, James Faubion, Cymene Howe, and Marcel LaFlamme. “Sound + Vision:
Experimentingwith theAnthropological Research Article of theFuture." Cultural Anthropology 31,
no.4(2016): 459–63. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.01
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1998.
Dyson, Frances. SoundingNewMedia: Immersion andEmbodiment in the Arts andCulture.
Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2009.
Feld, Steven and Donald Brenneis. “Doing Anthropologyin Sound.” American Ethnologist 31,
no. 4 (2008): 461-74.
Hsu,W.F.“DigitalEthnographyTowardAugmentedEmpiricism:ANewMethodologicalFramewor
k,” Journal of Digital Humanities 3, No. 1 (Spring 2014). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-
1/digitalethnography-toward-augmented-empiricism-by-wendy-hsu/.
Kapchan, Deborah, ed., TheorizingSoundWriting. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UniversityPress,
2017.
Lingold, MaryCaton, Darren Mueller, and WhitneyTrettien, eds., Digital SoundStudies.
Durham, NC: DukeUniversityPress, 2018.
Makagon, Daniel and Mark Neumann. RecordingCulture: Audio Documentaryandthe
Ethnographic Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: SagePublications, 2008.
Tausig, Benjamin. Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, andConstraint. New York: Oxford
UniversityPress, 2019.

9. Tausig | The Audible Future 33
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