Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

For Part 2 of this interview, which focuses on tinnitus, join our Patreon for free: patreon.com/phantompower.

Staring around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology and representation and rhetoric and identity, but what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does a life develop a kind of texture of feeling over time? Affect studies is field interested in these questions, interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but affect isn’t reducible to words. So, it’s easy to see why affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars. 

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox.

And this is only the first half of our lengthy conversation. In a bonus episode, we present Part 2, which discusses Marie Thompson’s recent research on tinnitus and hearing loss. And because we’ve heard from people who find our tinnitus content helpful, we don’t want to put that behind a paywall, so we’re sharing it in our Patreon feed at the free level. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/phantompower and sign up as a free member and you’ll instantly get access to that episode in your podcast app of choice, as well as other content we plan to drop this summer when we are on break with the podcast.

Photo credit: Alexander Tengman

Transcript

Robotic Voice  00:00

This is Phantom Power

Marie Thompson  00:16

And this is difficult given the habits of the discipline or disciplines that I’m engaging with, I think that we can’t point to a particular set of sounds as inherently emancipatory or radical or having a kind of liberating potential, there’s a need to think carefully about that.

Mack Hagood  00:39

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today I’m bringing you an episode with a scholar who I feel is just an intellectual kindred spirit. We have a lot of the same interests. We’ve written on similar topics and she’s someone that I’ve learned a lot from. My guest is Marie Thompson, Associate Professor at the Open University in the UK. Marie is a theorist of noise, and she has been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound. With the study of affect.

Starting around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology, representation and rhetoric and identity.

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