Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq by J. Martin Daughtry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq by J. Martin Daughtry Sarah J. Dietsche Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. By J. Martin Daughtry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. [ 344 p. ISBN 9780199361496 (hardcover). $29.95; ISBN 9780199361526 (e-book), varies.] Notes, glossary, bibliography, index. The Iraq War and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are among the most controversial topics in modern American society. Soldiers return changed—if not physically wounded, often with mental or emotional scars. Some of these wounds—most notably, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or the signature injury of the Iraq War, Traumatic Brain Injury—were created not by shrapnel or bullets, but by the sounds of war. In Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, J. Martin Daughtry addresses not only the wounds that belliphonic sounds (a term coined by Daughtry to describe the spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat) can create but also the ways in which sounds were experienced and used by soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and insurgents during the war. It is worth noting that the term "war" in this case does not fit a strict definition, but Daughtry's research documents the period beginning with the initial Shock and Awe campaign (March 21, 2003) through the end of 2011, when the last foreign combat troops left Iraq. Daughtry's main argument in Listening to War is that belliphonic sounds have measurable physiological and psychological effects on listeners, and that those effects differ greatly based on the divergent experiences of auditors. The listener's location, cultural background, role as participant or observer, etc., all affect these experiences. Daughtry compares and contrasts these effects with those of sounds that are heard during normal life (in America or Iraq) as well as those produced during other conflicts. J. Martin Daughtry is an Associate Professor of Music at New York University. His work has had a preoccupation with violence from the start. One of his earliest projects—and his best-known publication—was the volume that he co-edited with Jonathan Ritter, Music in the Post 9/11 World (New York: Routledge, 2007), which explored how 9/11 shaped music in the United States and around the globe. In addition to his work in music and sound related to the post-9/11 era, he also studies music and violence in Russia. Situated within the field of ethnomusicology, his work focuses on music and politics, acoustic violence, and sound studies. There has been a fair amount of music research that was produced in reaction to the Iraq War (including Daughtry's own co-edited volume mentioned above; Chris Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music [New York: The New Press, 2005]; Sarah J. Dietsche, "Sound Divide: American Popular Music's Response to the [End Page 67] 'War on Terror' During the George W. Bush Administration," [Ph.D. diss., The University of Memphis, 2016]), as well as research on music that the soldiers heard, used, and produced during the war (Jonathan R. Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009]), but Daughtry's book explores this era in a different way. He discusses the actual sounds of bullets, explosions, and other common belliphonic sounds, and draws on techniques from the field of sound studies. Originating from John Cage's questions about how sounds from plants, white noise, and even blood pumping through our own veins can be experienced and influence us, the field of sound studies began in earnest in the 1990s and was largely codified in Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). The section headings of Sterne's book, The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012), outline the six main areas of sound studies: Hearing, Listening, Deafness; Spaces, Sites, Scapes; Transduce and Record; Collectivities and Couplings; Aesthetics, Experiences, Interpretation; and Voices. In Listening to War, Daughtry addresses many of these subjects, and his work continues to define this evolving research area. The first chapter focuses on the actual sounds experienced during the Iraq War. Daughtry...