Sound

Abstract

This chapter takes sound as the object of biography, drawing from anthropological concepts of object biographies and the social life of things. It argues that sounds have social lives and acquire lively biographies through “re” practices—reuse and reissue. The chapter discusses the practices through which certain sounds take on an agentive capacity through reuse, using Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Arthur Verocai’s “Seville” as an illustrated example. Next it addresses the role that reissues play in curating and authoring sound biographies. The chapter identifies themes for thinking about sound having a biography: that sound has agency; that this agency has implications for practices of creativity and property ownership; that sounds and artists are co-constituted; and that acknowledging people and things (sound) are co-constituted has implications for biography more broadly. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is possible to write the life of sound.