Sounds as They Are

Abstract Sounds as They Are theorizes non-notated sounds in recordings of notated classical music. It studies the expressive rhythm of sounds made by a musician’s body and sounds contributed to a track by the recording medium itself. The book establishes a typology of unwritten music across four major categories: sounds of breath, sounds of touch, sounds of effort, and surface noise. Audible events including inhales, exhales, finger taps, valve clacks, guitar squeaks, grunts, moans, and wax cylinder hisses are recognized as music and analyzed within the score being recorded. Scores, spectrograms, and audio excerpts combine to create a nomenclature for unwritten music. The book’s methodology is intertwined with the aesthetics and ethics of non-notated sounds, including their reception by sound engineers, critics, and scholars. It uncovers insidious inequalities across music studies and the recording industry, including the silencing of body and breath sounds along lines of gender and race. The book sets forth a theory of inclusive track analysis (ITA), a methodology that makes a comprehensive census of all audible events on a given recording and codifies their musical function. ITA is grounded in the philosophy of pragmatism. With applications beyond classical music, the theory demonstrates the expressive, interpretive, and embodied possibilities that emerge when all sounds are valued coequally.