In “Introduction: Hearing Vibrations,” Shelley Trower examines the development of scholarly, scientific, and popular writings about sound as vibration. She is particularly interested in how attempts to detect, analyze and control sound as vibration lead to new developments in a variety of scientific fields, including psychology, neurology, physiology, as well as practices that used vibration as a means of establishing the objective basis of their ideas such as spiritualism. For Trower, these writings about vibration opened up new modes of understanding the relationship between mind and body, between internal thoughts, feelings and emotions on the one hand, and external materialities including bodies and objects on the other.

The following videos exemplify some of Trower’s points. The top two  are referred to in the text. The bottom two are an example of how vibration exists between and through objects, and always has the potential to be transformed into sound.

White Lives on Speakers by Yoshimasa Kato and Yuchi Ito

A visit to an anechoic chamber, John Cage

The architecture of radio:

What does wi-fi sound like?