Humming

Reviews / Votes

Hmmm. Your lips are sealed and your mouth is closed, and yet you have a voice. Whence does it come? How can it be both sonorous and silent? By what means does it overflow a body that has turned in on itself? How can it hang in the air? This is not just a book about humming. Rather, Suk-Jun Kim uses the hum to penetrate the cracks in the very surface of existence. In so doing, he offers a profound meditation on the phenomena of language, voice and being. * Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK * In Humming Suk-Jun Kim investigates a sounding practice beyond artistic research, although the book originated in a sound art project. Probing the sound and the phenomenon of the hum with phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, he opens up a philosophical perspective, neither eschewing further-reaching arguments, psychoanalysis, nor poetic passages. This concise study gives food for thought to artists and academics. * Julia Schroeder, Researcher at ARS - Cupras, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany * From hum collecting in the field, via Cage, Calvino, Kafka, Tarkovsky and Prime Minister David Cameron, and elaborated through the discourse of psychoanalysis, Suk-Jun Kim personably and eruditely shows us that the humming of ourselves and others, a universally familiar yet furtive phenomenon, offers a nuanced opening for sound studies and the study of the voice - there is nothing humdrum about humming. * John Drever, Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK * Humming is ubiquitous, yet its meaning and significance has received little attention by scholars of sound. All that changes with Suk-Jun Kim's Humming. In this slim but tightly-argued volume, Kim explicates humming through a critical and psychoanalytic lens. The result is a lucid yet intricate account of humming's deceptive simplicity. * Brian Kane, Associate Professor of Music, Yale University, USA, and author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014) *