ABSTRACT
Most scholarship on sound sensation and religious practice has focused on the role of music, however diversely defined, in mediating spiritual experience. Left out from these scholarly accounts of religious music are other forms and “genres” of sound that feed into the complex topography of sensually mediated religious experience, a topography that forms the backdrop against which spiritual leadership and community are performed and validated. Still, an important insight of conventional scholarly accounts of sacred music is that religious traditions differ substantially in how they conceptualize “sacred sound,” that is, sound that mediates divine presence.
