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Why Sound Matters
A poignant consideration of the material aspect of sound and how it fundamentally shapes our experience of the world, both in its presence and absence
From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being. He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings. He considers the consequences of the commodification of sound in the digital era. And he looks at what’s at stake in trying to preserve the world’s dwindling quiet places.
Interspersed with personal reflections from years of working in the music business, this book investigates sound’s role in the environment, its value as a material, its relationship to labor, and how it affects our interactions with one another. Krukowski invites you to hear the world anew and renew your relationship with one of our most precious natural resources. So listen up!
From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being. He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings. He considers the consequences of the commodification of sound in the digital era. And he looks at what’s at stake in trying to preserve the world’s dwindling quiet places.
Interspersed with personal reflections from years of working in the music business, this book investigates sound’s role in the environment, its value as a material, its relationship to labor, and how it affects our interactions with one another. Krukowski invites you to hear the world anew and renew your relationship with one of our most precious natural resources. So listen up!
- GenresMusic
128 pages, Hardcover
Published October 21, 2025
4 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
About the author
Damon Krukowski
19 books13 followersDamon Krukowski is a writer and musician. Author of The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, he has taught writing and sound (and writing about sound) at Harvard University. He was in the indie rock band Galaxie 500 and is currently one half of the folk-rock duo Damon & Naomi. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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October 24, 2025
Great read and recommend. My only quibble is the focus solely on music as material rather than ALSO as the symbolic form through which meaning emerges.
Krukowski treats sound as primarily a material phenomenon, that is vibrations, frequencies, and physical substrates like vinyl or tape (and the labor that goes into producing these material artifacts). This perspective is valuable, yet it misses what Susanne K. Langer identified as music's true epistemological function: music is a presentational symbol that objectifies subjective reality. It does not simply move through physical space in material form but more importantly presents the morphology of feeling in a form available for contemplation.
A purely material conception cannot account for music's import - what the music carries that is not reducible to its physical properties. When we focus on medium alone (analog vs. digital, vinyl vs. streaming), we miss the fact that music's symbolic function depends on its expressive form, not its substrate.
Krukowski uses the question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, is there a sound? In his materialist conception he argues, correctly, yes there is of course a sound. But my point is that it means nothing. If an embodied human being is not there to experience the sound of the tree falling, then regardless of the material presence, the falling tree has no meaning.
Krukowski treats sound as primarily a material phenomenon, that is vibrations, frequencies, and physical substrates like vinyl or tape (and the labor that goes into producing these material artifacts). This perspective is valuable, yet it misses what Susanne K. Langer identified as music's true epistemological function: music is a presentational symbol that objectifies subjective reality. It does not simply move through physical space in material form but more importantly presents the morphology of feeling in a form available for contemplation.
A purely material conception cannot account for music's import - what the music carries that is not reducible to its physical properties. When we focus on medium alone (analog vs. digital, vinyl vs. streaming), we miss the fact that music's symbolic function depends on its expressive form, not its substrate.
Krukowski uses the question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, is there a sound? In his materialist conception he argues, correctly, yes there is of course a sound. But my point is that it means nothing. If an embodied human being is not there to experience the sound of the tree falling, then regardless of the material presence, the falling tree has no meaning.
Displaying 1 of 1 review