murmur…whisper: sounds of Australian football1

Margaret Meran Trail, 2007

abstract
This paper addresses the realm of sonic-kinaesthetic effect which is a significant part of
the way Australian football works. Conceiving of football as a game played across a
range of virtual and actual sites, and conceiving of all participants as ‘players’ the paper
discusses football as an art of sensing, illuminating and twisting all that is virtual,
fantastic and exorbitant, through any number of forms made up in the immediate
present and finite matter of social spaces. Sound and vibration are discussed as the
materials that gives this terrain its liquidity and character of transfπormative possibiltiy.
The sounds of coaching, barracking, media commentary, everyday murmuring and
muttering are offered as examples of styles of perceptual complication and experiment
that are part of football’s art.

murmur
Football murmuring is an art of eloquent understatement, a performance of
passing by. Neither eye contact nor response is required. Well executed, it
causes not one ripple in the wider surrounds but finds its mark with fatal
accuracy and no hope of rejoinder.

It is 8.00am, a grey Fremantle morning and I detour into Gino’s for a quick
heartstarter on my way to work. I’m tightly wrapped in my voluminous hand
crocheted Dockers scarf. As I pass the door three burly men, seated like
Cerberus in navy overalls, begin a sotto vocce chorus, the old Supertramp song:
Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer. Even in my morning fog, there’s no
mistaking this sonic arrow aimed directly at my heart, straight through the
colours of my scarf. I perform the correct response: half smile with raised
eyebrow and swish of the colours as I disappear inside. Oh very well done. I
spend the next hour thinking up what I’ll say if I see them Monday morning.

There is no rest, no interval, no lull in the long million-voice chant of the

football season. You are fairgame, you are on field and you had better have
your wits about you every conscious/unconscious second what ever who ever
wherever you are.
crackle2
Far beyond the loom of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australian football is
being played throughout a net of interconnecting sites both actual and virtual
which includes (and exceeds): specific people in their many versions, as
families, lovers, friends, enemies, workmates and strangers, and all the places
these people inhabit: backyards, ovals, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, office
corridors, streets, busstops, trains, bookmakers, pubs, clubs and cafes. Dreams,
jokes, fantasies, internet sites, television and radio programs, books,
newspapers, comic strips, calendars, the lightning wd spce of sms mssgng, and
the scrabbling sweaty dirt-n-divot flying grounds of the games themselves: all
are sites in which football is going on. Each site exerts different physical and
psychic pressures on those who play in them. Different styles of perception and
response are engaged in them, and they each contain varying potentials for
creating new events, for reproducing, recombining and making things happen.
This manyness, this multitudeof players, modes, sites, actionsis not only a
characteristic of football, it is it’s most important material. That the actions of
the men on the football field ignite fuses of psycho-sonic and kinaesthetic effect
that crackle and spark across temporal and spatial dimensions is the point and
pleasure of the game. And that these fuselines of effect are rewired, relaid, relit
by all players in an inexhaustible theatre of effectwit, vivid feeling, the
mustering and manifestation of real poweris both the exhilaration and
significance of football.

jingle3
The logo of the TV program, Friday Night Football appears in the bottom right
corner of the screen to signal the cut to an ad-break. It is marked by a small but
distinctly audible flurry of chimes like those that accompany Walt Disney’s
cartoon depiction of the fairy Tinkerbell. This sound, signifier of the
manifestation of a magical being, specifically a fairy, is in a way remarkable for
its unremarkability in the context of football. Why does no one turn a hair when
fairy chimes are played over the top of a tribute to the career of some paradigm
of masculinity and fearsome football prowessWayne Carey, or Greg
Williams? In part, of course, because it is television where the transformation of
the singular space of the screen into the multiple spaces of programming is often
signalled by such jingling, turn-the-page, sonic signing. Nevertheless, they don’t
use fairy chimes to cut from the news: there are ways to shift televisual spaces
with gravitas and propriety.

No one notices the fairy chimes on Friday Night Football because they are
appropriate to the context, issue from it, belong there: because we are in
magical territory. That is, in the territory of transformation and becoming,
calling forth power, keeping it together, losing it completely and struggling in
general. Much like the sorcerer’s apprentice, with the challenges of making
force manifest and then harnessing or battling with manifestations of the truly
powerful (like Tinkerbell who although fatally poisoned, is revived by the
magical force of a crowd of children clapping and shouting).

Fairytale animations, cartoons, horror and action movies all use the sounds of
commonplace physical events to signal the eruption of magical or otherworldly
power: claps, chimes, bells, explosions, the hissing of steam, thunder cracking
and so forthreverberant, penetrative noise, generated in the collision,
explosion, impact of physical materials. Football television reappropriates these
movie sounds and their magical associations in its links, titles, jingles and
animated graphics, reapplying magico-sonic operators to the representation of
real physical events. This works, is unremarkable, because football is a realm in
which the virtual and material are constantly vibrating in an interconnected but
unsettled relation with one another. Like that moment in a cartoon where the
magician is suddenly stretched, squashed, elongated enormously, flips through
the forms of bird ball cow tricycle and cat, on the way to becoming a handsome
young man or whatever.

Football is an art of sensing, illuminating and twisting all that is virtual, fantastic
and exorbitant, through any number of forms made up in the immediate present
and finite matter of social spaces. Playing football (conceiving all participants as
players) we are in Tinkerbell’s territory: all may transform in a flash, there is a
great foreboding, desires surge, the hair stands on end, the body shivers, and
lumps of sentient and insensible matter smash at each other all around in
dizzying displays of effort to unlock and wrest the unfolding of the next second
out of the hands of fate. Football even has the advantage over Neverland
Tinkerbell’s original home, occupying the sadly trivialised stages of fiction
and fairytaleof being consensually hallucinated as real, present and ordinary
to those who play it. Thus the closest possible relation, propagation and testing
of fantastic and material realities is played out in football, because in it, these
relations are not trivialised and diminished but are imagined to be of real value.
This is football’s sport, in fact.

ripple4
Football is noisy. Its various theatres of operation are flooded with and
productive of wild and wonderful sonic events and practices. Especially insofar
as sound is bound up with the body through utterance, vibration, invisible and
fleeting occupations of space, and the manipulation and deployment of physical
force, sound is the means by which football’s network of interconnecting sites
achieves its liquidity (penetration, shivering, recombination, wit, swiftness,
sleight of hand).

Sound is percepetual material unstable both in time and space. It splits from the
immediate time and space of its source and travels. Who hasn’t watched with
interest the uncanny second where boot meets ball before sound hits the ear?
Sound manifests within the body of the listener, a creature of splitting infection
parasitic viral leaping: I have had the Western Bulldogs’ theme song playing in
my head for six days. Spend time with someone and you pick up their vocal
intonation. Galileo said it: ‘certain tones seem “… to kiss and bite.”’ Yet no
one’s there. Thus ‘there’ expands, becomes, intriguingly ‘here’: ‘t-here’, ‘th(e)-
air’. Sound challenges the necessity of proximity for closeness, for intimacy, for
wounding.
Abstract work with deeply sensual effect, sound places Word back in the body,
melts, melds and investigates this relationship. The perceived separation
between mind and body collapses when things are sounding. Word becomes
sound and sound noise, the privileging of language and its meaning gets messed
up by language’s involvement with all sorts of bodily effects: sibilants, singing,
kissy-growling, yelping and so forth, conduct a kind of physical work in
combination with Word that can dispense with or at least complicate meaning.
Further, language, far from just communicating sense, lodges in the psyche and
thereby the body in freaky associations occasioned by primal scenes, traumatic
events and who-knows-what-else, the close relations of children and their pets
probably. Word-sound works in the psyche in strange chains of association,
affect, effect.

Sound is a physical force. The sustained reverberation of gongs and bells, the
tinkling liquid sonic structure of wind chimeswhere the attack of the tones is
so rapid, light and arrhythmic that a school of tiny notes, like fish, swims
through your bodycan make you fall into reverie and unconsciousness. It can
make you jerk and jump as well as keep you awake. Felt it creates the space of
the body, gives dimension to viscosity, to the mass of muscle and bone. Sounds
inhabit the body as a flock, a cloud of bats that fly straight through, sonar
shimmering the bones and liquid, meat, tracing form, exacting response,
feeding, flying on. You don’t hear just with your head, the whole body twitters
and hums with the kinaesthetic buzz and kick of tiny sounds knocking on the
matter of your body. As an abstract force sound can break the operations of
thought, through volume or sledgingmagic words of abuse and humour
exchanged by football competitors. It conjures memories and combines with
language as the material of thought and vocal communication.

The interconnection of things: people and people, people and objects, objects
and objects, is the character of the zone of noise. Contemplation, ironic
distance, the spaces of separation are hard to maintain there. From internal
dialogue through imagination and the sounds of dreams the emotional
responses evoked by music, all the possibilities of vocal utterance, to the
sounding world and its visceral effects, its violences and eroticisms, sound is the
liquid material of perception. It combines, collapses, bridges, germinates and
expresses form.

snap
The passionate address of the coach is language in service of affect/effect as
much as explanation, damning or provoking savage spectres of shame and duty,
consoling or bestowing the helium-infused gift of praise. If there are shards of
effect that can be transmitted via language from beyond the boundary where
overview, judgement and history resideinto the bodies of the players and the
haptic space of play, this is the stage of their invocation. Hence, coaches shout,
they prowl, speak quietly, plead, point, chop the air, wave their arms, make
long slow exhalations, spit, use rhetoric, humour, counterpoint and surprise.
They do not speak so much as conjure effect in every singular player and the
collective all at once, through embodied utterance, performed language. No
communicative act in football is so controlled and fiercely protected as this. It is
football’s most serious moment. In the coaching huddle, utterance connects the
abstractions of the coaching box with the tactical, embodied moment of play
via sonic kinaesthetic twists that, in conjunction with the Word, generate bodily
effect.

Players are trained not only to receive and apply the instructions of the coach
but also to absorb and distribute the spirit and physical intent communicated in
the address, to be sensitive to and act upon the coach’s kinaesthetic appeals.
Players in the pre-match address or in the huddle speak aloud sounds of
acceptance and understanding: yeah, okay, lets go, and good work. These
promises, tiny sonic bombs, interconnected mnemonic depth charges sunk in
one another, detonate on field, ignite the blazing formation of the team, later,
when the space of play and the assaults of the opposition threaten to divide and
sap, and the coach is far away in his eyrie.
Talk to each other! screams the angry crowd.

mutter
Muttering to oneself, attempting to interpret play through listening to radio
commentary or enquiring of neighbours ‘What was that for?’ Commentating
oneself, lifting the vocal style, intonations and vocabulary of radio and
television broadcasters in impromptu vocal performances that knit together live
action with informed analysis; making direct appeals, coaching-style, to players,
umpires, to the changing geographies of friend and foe around, to God; falling
silent, gasping, groaning and roaring in response to collisions, ‘posters’ (when
the ball hits the goal posts), impossible or dazzling feats; being subsumed in the
roaring, singing and special effects only possible to experience and wield in a
crowd of 80,000 occupying an oval stadium; fielding the jangling intrusive and
exciting effects of ads, music and announcements, of mobile phones, the cries
of children; managing everybody’s hunger, thirst, alcohol intake, going to the
toilet, cold, sun in the eyes, rain, hail, snow; regulating emotional responses to
the changing fortunes of the game, through inner dialogue viz feelings of
irritation, devastation, jubilation or boredom. Daydreaming. Humming. Jokes.
The play of wit across it all, wrangling, defusing, and inciting fervour.

Utterance in the football crowd is an immensely varied set of sonic practices

which traverses private even unconscious mutterings to collective, regulated,
public declarations in a twinkling, where functional language intertwines with
magic word and word as weapon, where recitation of statistics and history are
deployed to effect a terrain drenched in overwhelming physical and psychic
force, where vocal utterance combines with kinaesthetic, bodily effect more so
than in any other site of public discourse.

trill
In football the abstract and visceral qualities of words become sport, in an
onomatopoeic play using the precise rigidity and laconic style of footy lore to
combine with the sensuous excesses of its language. Word meaning and its
various codes of authorityread it in the paper, heard it in an interview, placed
in context of cited statistics, recited history, insightful interpretations of tricky
passages of play lies next to, struggles with, must stand up to, is intermingled
with, howls, grunts, roars, filthy expletives, hateful and savagely sexist terms
which shock and incite, spontaneous bursts of song, improvisations of joyful
trilling, zones of expressive and excessive vocal noise, gasps, roars, screams,
laughter, stuttering and spitting and the naive and oblique observations of
children. Wit often effects the threshold shift between these zones: playful,
vengeful, recontextualising, revealing and undermining posturing of every kind.

shatter
Watching the Fremantle Dockers and the Melbourne Demons, live from
Subiaco Oval, on Channel Nine’s Sunday Football. Who will prevail? Freo’s
Peter Bell that’s who. Bell’s pixy torso twists with a quick snap back across his
body. A player runs forward, arms wide staring down the umpire who yells
‘Play on!’ arms flying up like wings. Where is the ball? Scout it by reading the
positions of the menleaning in against each other, staggering, eyes up,
running out. Sliding on the wet grass they grapple as the ball slips away towards
goal where it spins on its point in front of the post for so long the crowd laughs.
Tension in my head, eyes laser frozen to the TV as I listen frowning to the
commentators explain what I can’t make out. Matthew Pavlich marks and then
gets a fifty meter advance because a Melbourne player is mouthing off. A
certain goal. Fremantle on the March! they cry.

The TV blasts five quick clips of Luke MacPharlin with squealing guitar: spekky
marks, impossible kicks, his body bent back horizontal, ball streaking clean off
his foot like a bullet. Falling and falling, one leg left high above him and hitting
the ground, ball wrapped in his arms, while men smash down around like hail.

I’m horribly tense. Body stock still and feeling dark. Denser than normal. Fingers
twitch. Sore head. I’m upset on Adam Yze’s behalf. His hands on hips roaring. A
commentator says That was harsh, but the shouting umpire throws up his arms
and the Dockers get a free kick. Curse them. I [am feeling homesick and ] want
Melbourne to win. But MacPharlin marks, sliding in across the grass: from an
impossible angle, kicks wide across the face of goal to a scrunched up knot of
players, from which Crowley, in the time it takes me to gasp on the in-breath,
hands up, neat as an air steward, snatches the ball, drops it onto his foot and
through the posts. Freo are snappy and clean, solve all problems sparkling while
the Dees just look leaden. I’m silent but for sharp breaths in and out, just cries
and gasps, no one to speak with. Macdonald flying takes an awful blow,
whiplash ripping up his spine and falls to the ground like a rag. He’ll be seeing
stars they say as trainers run out and his forearm folds across his eyes. Wish that
watching could dematerialise me altogether. Shatter me in pixels grass blades
dirt sweat and yelling right into the ether never again to recohere.

Oh no! Two Demons smash together mid-air and both are knocked out. Great
courage, says the commentary. They replay the collision over and over. One
man has knees curled in to his chest rolling and wincing, the other still hasn’t
moved. Suddenly on my feet shouting Come on Aaron Davey!! But he misses.
The names they call are too small, too short and light to cover the ground and
the speed and all the men smashing together. Knees drive into chests and chins,
backs bend, legs twist and heads snap on their necks like towels. Who I am
coheres is blown apart.

jerk5
Watching a match on television or listening on radio, football’s sonic
kinaesthetic effects are vividly felt. Remote from the football ground, the action
on field, the press and swirl of the crowd, still the spectator’s body jerks, shivers,
shouts, leaps to the feet, flushes hot and cold, becomes lightheaded, must look
away. This is so even watching or listening to an old recording of a game when
you know the outcome. In television, the camera, its close ups, slow motion
replays and montages of spectacular action, in combination with music, crowd
sound, the commentators’ dizzy switching between measured analysis and
excited yelling, extracts the most tooth grinding dynamics of play, and remixes
them in cuts designed for maximum excitement and discomfort. Equilibrium is
thoroughly disturbed. Re-collect, cool down, remind oneself it’s only a game,
rub the aching head, breathe, stretch tense limbs, mutter reassurrances, damn
with hot curses. This flow of response testifies to the effectiveness of play in
destabilising, confronting, threatening its participants.

By listening to (which implies feeling) football, the extent, complexity and

subtlety of phenomenal effects and their operation as forces within the game
becomes palpable. Football listened to, felt, uttered, seems more than anything
concerned to test the relationships between bodies, will and world, through
creating a zone which complicates perceptual experience. More than
complicates, drives perception up against affects that test it to the point of
breaking. Thus, running, a player is tackled and thrown to the ground; seeking
the ball smashes into the bodies of others and gets knocked out; is screamed
and sworn at, jostled, elbowed and kneed in the chest. The player will run as
fast as possible on a slippery surface but must stop, spin, duck out of the way of
Mal Michaelsa gigantic, fast man with a name full of M’s and kick the ball
through the posts. As I say above, participating in any of footballs many
interconnected sites, from dreams, unconscious mutterings, tiny remarks and
recognitions to the more pointed and organised effort of training for, going
along to, and/or playing actual games of football requires this same engagement
in a zone of perceptual complication. It will not always be so ferocious as on
field in game time, but sometimes it will be. The sonic-kinaesthetic-semiotic
play of football subjects all players to real pressures of material and psychic
kinds and dares all players to respond in the course of play, for this is football’s
sport.

wobble6
What is at risk and in question then in football is the condition of being human,
tested in relation to a range of its perceived alterities: as a physical being, an
intelligent being, a civil being, a rational being. Playing football challenges
human beings to exist in and overcome the edges of themselves in these terms.
This challenge involves the composition and enactment of tactics designed to
tire, confuse and surprise all players, psych them out, enrage them, inflame
them with stupid desire, and to muster the absolute force of inanimate matter
and physical laws to confound the progress of play. Thus football also requires
of all players inspired responses to these challenges: acts of reflex, strength, wit
and composure that solve and dispense with these many obstacles. In football,
players seek the limits of their powers and try to overcome the inherited
definitions of these; to remake, re-idealise and produce new moves, new play,
new bodies, singular and collective, with new solutions to formal limits and
long-held expectations, to create uncertainties, surprises and actions that result
in redefined possibility, play, freedom.

hum
Thus, football is a space for defining limits and for exceeding definitions. This is
how it manages to inhabit a place within culture that is associated with real life
and the everyday, while still actively engaging forces of alterity or exorbitance.
Football is marked by what people understand and experience as ‘everyday’ or
‘real’ life. From this perspective, players are not actors, do not assume
characters, play is not fiction, pretence or illusion. Participation in football does
not require a rejection of conventional values or styles of life. On the contrary, it
knits players into the general operation of the social world. Football is taught
openly in schools, played on public ground, broadcast on public radio and
television. It is a family activity, building relationships between children and
adults, families and families, providing the expressive framework for all sorts of
collective identifications: local community and national identity perhaps the
most obvious. This ubiquity, the common experience and language which
football provides, is the social grounding for the definition/s of being human
which are tested in it. And yet in testing these definitions, football manages at
times to exceed and redefine them. Thus it not only encounters its alterities but
transforms, coming into conflict with its own social ground and requiring the
conditions that support it to shift and change.
sob
For example, professional football increasingly detaches play and football
players from traditional connections with local geography. It wants a national
league in which players can be drafted to any team in the country and teams
themselves seek to establish membership bases in cities other than their original
home. The recent move of the Collingwood Football Clubone of Melbourne’s
oldest and largest clubs: one known for the ferocious loyalty of its
supportersfrom its local ground in Collingwood to the new super-facility The
Lexus Centre, in another suburb, hammered another resounding nail into the
coffin of the relation between football and locality in Melbourne. Local ground
has long been significant to football and felt to be of defining significance to
human identity. The detachment of football from local ground causes grief in
football communities, not only because a traditional structure of the game and
its attendant social practices disappears but because this indicates the arrival
into the everyday of a style of human life in which identity and significance are
not attached to locality but constructed out of other materials, in relation to
other sites.

smash7
We also see footballs’ openness to re-defining the human in those montage
sequences, interspersed through television broadcasts of weekly matches, of
footballs most violent and spectacular moments. These clips attempt to re-
idealise the everyday bodies of players as super-real bodies of light, force and
noise. Not so much in their presentation of acts of rare skill and courage, but
more in the use of camera angles and editing conventions lifted from action
movies, which reduce the world to those aspects which scream, skid, collide
and explode. This action is accompanied by samples lifted from rock music
chosen to affect, as rock sound does so well, the manifestation and control of
extra-ordinary power. This extraction of specific qualities of football play and
their reiteration in combination with other technologies of representation, other
cultural reference points, is no doubt an indicator of football’s active interest in
experimenting with its own ‘real’ materials.
grind
If sound is the material that enables football’s liquid play throughout its many
material, bodily, psychic and linguistic sites, vibration gives that liquidity its
character of transformative possibility. A liquid world might be whooshy,
formless, vague. Vibration grounds it, grinds it, not forcing definition but
sending the tremor of potential through it, indicating an imminent but indefinite
transformation of form. Vibration, the oscillation of a material, its trembling, its
shimmering, produces effects/affects. Vibration is not a transformation from one
state to another but the production of an effect from the intensification, the
agitation of a material. Oscillation gives rise not to the realisation of definite
forms but the experience of a fundamental instability of form and possibilities
for extending their reach.

buzz8
Vibration is the dynamo, the inter-converter of football’s absolute materiality
with its liquid, sonic-kinaesthetic-semiotic sound world. In football vibration is
everywherein the shaking of bodies, of language, of voice, of the meaning of
things. Every material within reach is intensified, shaken, vibrated, in an effort to
test its limits, psych or squash it into something else and produce its
transformation.

Vibration is also fundamental to sound. Making and hearing sound(s) are

vibratory processes: sound forms, the world articulates, and we are drawn into
various relationships with it via this shimmering, glittering.

It is through the operation of vibration that football’s best, most enlivening, most
confronting effects traverse the virtual and material, the exorbitant and
everyday, making their twisty manifestations in the multitude of sites and
registers of human experience, their curious, curling interconnections, and their
challenges to the condition of being human. Conceived in this way football is
the streaming of a sonic-kinaesthetic hum, through the spaces of daily life,
relentlessly testing the physical, charting the dimensions and limits of forms, re-
making relations with matter; testing intelligence and civility, experimenting
with the liquidity of language, wit, internal dialogue, public declaration; testing
the bounds of rationality, daring dissolution, conjuring and letting loose figures
of animality and madness.

Football ceaselessly re-infuses the quotidian with the unknown, uncanny and
exorbitant, freeing experience from obstinate assumptions. Football affiliates
with forces that will further its potentials, even though they may conflict with its
traditions. It does all this because football wants to create, in the commentators
oft-repeated words, something from nothingdaring and surprising play,
elegant and deft solutions to obvious and impossible seeming problems.

whisper…
A social force to be reckoned with, football is worth the listen…
1
In this paper I am influenced by the ideas and observations of numerous writers and
artists. Especially I have applied certain styles of thought and writing suggested by
others, which are pertinent to this investigation. It is important and useful to name
these relations, but explaining them within the body of the text would be clunky and
ponderous. For this reason, because the ideas prefer it, I am electing to name
important references and contextualising discussions in notes instead.

2
The possibility of approaching football as a manyness and identifying its
significance as such, owes much to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who have so
thoroughly articulated the notion of multiplicity and the rhizomatic structure, and
explored the application of this notion in philosophy. I have taken the significance of
this to heart, not only in the analysis but style of writing in which I present it. See
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.

3
The possibility of articulating football as a stage for the manifestation of force
follows Antonin Artaud’s articulation of the theatre in the same terms. See, for
instance Antonin Artaud, ‘The Alchemical Theatre’ in Antonin Artaud, The Theatre
and its Double, Grove Press, New York, 1958, pp. 48-52. Relations of the virtual and
the actual which also inform this section are proposed in Elizabeth Grosz ‘Deleuze’s
Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future’ in Ian Buchanan and
Claire Colebrook (eds) Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 214-234.

4
For eloquent descriptions of the phenomenal affects of sound and noise see: Douglas
Kahn, ‘Immersed in Noise’ in Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound
in the Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999,
pp.25-44. And for discussions about the relationship of Word and the body, Douglas
Kahn ‘Meat Voices’ in Douglas Kahn, ibid., pp. 290-358.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss and also contest Freud’s ruminations on the operations
of words in the psyche in A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 26-29.
The quote from Galileo is cited in Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, in Michael
Bull and Les Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Berg, Oxford & New York,
2003, p. 51.

For a discussion of sound which covers both its physical and abstract effects see:
Murray Schaeffer, ‘Open Ears’ ibid, pp.25-39. And for a useful investigation of sound
as physical force see Jacques Attali, Noise, Manchester University Press, Manchester,
1985.

The impossibility of maintaining ironic distance in an environment of sound is

discussed in Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
Quartet Books, London, 1998, pp. 188-189.

5
For thoughts on the kinaesthesias and synaesthesias pervading contemporary
popular cultural forms, as well as for a practice of listening and style of embracing
and attempting to propagate synaesthetic forms via writing, I am heavily indebted to
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun. Also interesting from this perspective is
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004.

6
For insights into some of the structures by which human beings construct and test
their alterior conditions see: Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, Routledge, New
York and London, 1993.

7
For a specific discussion on parallels between visuality and audiality see Kodwo
Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun, pp.180-182.

8
The discussion on vibration and its relation to football sound is somewhat obliquely
but still strongly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in the notion of the
molecular and its relation to becoming, see for instance Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp.248-252. Further, relationships
between matter and life articulated by Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Philosophy of Life’ in
Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, Allen and
Unwin, Sydney, 2004, pp. 185-214.