ABSTRACT
In this chapter I follow three lines of thinking on the role of aesthetics in sound studies over the past two decades, asking how the term binds together problems, areas, and projects. The first section considers the rhetorical function of aesthetics, the way its invocation is a signpost for scholars. The second explores how sound studies prompts a rethinking of the concept of the aesthetic, something widely understood to involve the category of beauty as conceptualized through a set of mutually supporting historical intellectual movements (18th-century Western philosophy, academic music appreciation, bourgeois values), a usage of the term currently waning but unlikely to dwindle completely. The third is to show how sound has played a role in the shift from an aesthetics of value to a “media aesthetics,” from a theory rooted in judgment to a theory with an agnostic approach to the merits of individual works, drawing instead from critical theory, media studies, and classical theories of aesthesis to consider how sound media (in both their individual specificity and their common mediality) shape how we encounter and process sense-experience in the first place.
