Sound Unseen

Global crime governance has emerged as an important component of world politics. It is manifested in national and international agendas, the proliferation of global regulations, growing international budgets, and the enlarged mandates of international organizations. As a result, the definition and prosecution of crime is now increasingly homogenous, but it also shows variance: some crime policies are institutionalized coherently or attached to strong internationalorganizations, while others are weak or dispersed across different forums. Based on sociological institutionalism, this book examines questions of structural variance in the institutional design of global governance. It shows that the interplay of strong actors and rationalization principles lead tomore coherent forms of global crime governance, while normative arguments related to crime are more likely to result in fragmented forms. In consequence - and contrary to many scholars' assumptions - global crime governance is strongest in those areas that are least attached to moral statements. The book develops a theory of society and applies this framework to explaining the sources and consequences of institutional design. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, the text analyzes the origins of global regulations, how they are disseminated, and why differences exist. The role of the United States in creating global rules and disseminating them is emphasized. Readers interested in international relations, global governance, globalization studies, world society studies, andcriminology will benefit from the theoretical and empirical results of this book.Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employingvarious techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete music Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound inmusic aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives-historical, cultural, philosophical and musical-and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways thatunseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases-from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to Zizek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.