Listening Beyond Sound and Life

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the embodied experience of “involuntary musical imagery” (a.k.a. “earworms”) and of the dynamics of the auditory imagination more broadly. It argues that imagined sounds regularly exhibit strange behaviors that audible vibrations cannot achieve and draws upon Husserl’s description of the living present and Sartre’s writing on intuition to construct a theory for why this might be the case. The second half of the chapter comprises a sustained attempt at a phenomenological description of a discrete experience of musical imagery. A brief epilogue muses on the similarities between imagined music and the memory of the dead, casting both as a kind of “haunting.” Throughout, the auditory imagination is presented as an ethnographic field site: a palimpsestic ecosystem of interconnection and difference within which the discrete experiences of individuals and groups matter.