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Infernal Sound Cues: Aural Geographies and the Politics of Noise

Every time Hamlet dies, “the world,” as Shakespearian scholar Wes Folkerth puts it, “fills up again with sound […] To hear, Hamlet tells us with his final breath, is what it is to be alive”. While that sentiment would be rightly and hotly contested by the Deaf community, it strikes those of us who can hear and who have no experience of Deaf culture as axiomatic. In his study of the “sonic landscapes” of Robert Ashley, Arthur J. Sabatini valorizes sound as “ultimately, the more dominant phenomenon in the context of the theatre experience […]”. One need not go this far, however, to advance the claim that despite the tyranny of the gaze in the society of the spectacle, the materiality of the ear, as acoustic agent, is still maintained by the language of the theatre: actors still audition, and the space of an auditorium is inhabited by an audience that listens as much as watches.