On the Fetishization of Sound

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

Our perception of sound is transformed in the social and economic field of late capital. The audiophilic approach to sound demonstrates how the melodic nature of musical sound (which corresponded to the historical era of living collective forms) gives way to the «visualization» of sound – its disintegration into autonomous «bright» fragments. Moreover, sound becomes an object of consumption – an investment activity, the logic of which is the extraction of surplus pleasure by means of money. However, there is also a counter tendency towards sound as an object of «common sense» in a community of judgment.