Part II Sounding Flesh: Pulse Salomé Voegelin

Introductory chapter to section ‘Sounding Flesh’ in the The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, Holger Schulze ed., NY: Bloomsbury, 2020.

The flesh is our softness and our sensuous skin. It is what outlines our form and defines the visual boundary of our body while marking the beginning of our being in the world as a being with every other thing. This flesh is our protection and shelter as well as our connection and conduit to being as a being together. It enables us to sense the world, to feel.

This section brings these fleshly connections and the ecology of the caress to audition. It extends the visible touch through an expanded listening into unseen connections and grasps the world as a volume of invisible entanglements, as an unseen sphere of codependence made visible by an expanded ear. This listening is not only physiological: hearing as the detection of sound waves moving a chain of tiny bones in the inner ear, or a matter of simple intelligibility and auditory reception, the sense of knowing what sounds and receiving what was said. Instead, it is an attitude and an attention to the invisible space between things that hears how matter moves and forms their connective tissue.