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I read Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin, published by Silver Press. It’s a messy, rich, and rewarding anthology that explores sound not just as music, but as an embodied experience, a political strategy, and a site of resistance. If you care about sound as something more than entertainment — this one’s for you.

The book gathers over 50 contributions by women and non-binary writers — essays, interviews, poems, fables, fragments, text scores. It’s expansive, chaotic, and intentionally so. The pieces range from personal reflections on listening, to sonic memories of war, to speculative writing on what sound does to and in the body.

You’ll find Ella Finer writing about the sound of a swan’s beating heart. Gascia Ouzounian reflects on how Turkish soldiers drowned out the screams of Armenian genocide victims with drumming — sound as deliberate military strategy. Composer and DJ Ain Bailey discusses her “sonic autobiographies,” where strangers gather to play each other the music that shaped them — and people often end up crying. That’s the power of music, says Bailey.

There are also texts on feminist amateur radio networks, percussion and trans identity, and the aesthetics of silence in contemporary Nordic music. Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich writes about women’s experiences of war in the Soviet Union — asking why suffering never seems to lead to real freedom. And Christina Hazboun, a London-based Palestinian writer, contributes a powerful reflection on the sounds of the May 2021 uprising in Palestine. I found myself hoping she’ll write more about what’s happened since — sonically and politically.

Sarah Shin, who together with Irene Revell has edited the book »Bodies of Sound«. © Vanda Playford

The book isn’t all politics and trauma, though. There are reflections on gossip, the sound of dreams, how elders in Anishinaabe communities listen to their surroundings, and listening with a “third ear” in conversations. The recurring image across the anthology is the ear — listening as an act of survival, of care, of protest.

It’s not all perfectly curated. There’s very little contextualization — the editors drop you straight into each text without much introduction. It can feel disorienting, but also stimulating. Personally, I would’ve appreciated more connective tissue between the contributions. Then again, the chaos is part of the point.

Some of my favorite contributors show up here — Sara Ahmed, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Daphne Oram. But I did wonder why Oliveros, whose deep listening practice is a clear inspiration for the editors, is only represented by a short letter to the writer Kate Millett. Including her conversation with Fred Maus on feminism and music from 1994 would’ve added useful context.

The book claims a feminist lens throughout, but I sometimes questioned how it was being applied. For instance, does including Oram, a pioneer of British electronic music in the 50s, automatically make the text feminist because of her gender? She may not have framed her work that way. The editors don’t really unpack this tension, nor do they define what they mean by feminism in this context.

That said, Bodies of Sound is still an important and inspiring collection. It’s less a book to read front to back and more a collection to return to — a reference, a logbook, a prompt for thinking differently about sound and listening.

If I taught musicology, I’d tell every student to get a copy. Anyone interested in sound — as politics, memory, body, and space — should read it.

👉 Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, Silver Press, £14.99.

Welcome to my page here on Sleeve. I’ll be sharing thoughts, essays, and side notes on music, sound, and culture — the things I keep circling back to when I’m supposed to be working on other stuff. To start with, I would like to say something about listening.

There’s this idea I’ve borrowed from the New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small. In his book Musicking, he poses the thought that music isn’t something we just listen to — it’s something we do. Even listening, when you’re really listening, is an active thing. You’re participating. You’re musicking.

But most of us have learned to treat music like a non-participatory product. Someone performs, we sit and consume. Politely. Quietly. And then there’s 'the voice shame' — the Norwegians even have a word for it: Stemmeskam. The sense that your voice doesn’t belong. Maybe someone told you, casually, once, that you couldn’t sing. So, you refrain from humming along with your favourite music while you're on the train for the fear that someone heard you. We need to deal with that and start telling children that they can sing, and that they have every right in the world to use their voice no matter how it sounds.

Meanwhile, music itself has often become a thing related to technological perfection: Autotuned, algorithm-fitted, X-Factor tight. No room for error. No room for us. I think that’s a loss. I would like to write about that loss here — about listening, about voice shame, about why music should be something we do, not just consume.

Thanks for being here. Tell me — do you sing? And if not, why?

'Gårdsangeren', a painting by Robert Storm-Petersen.