Humming

Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is a personal, intimate act. It can also be a powerful way in which people open up to others and share collective memories. In religious settings such as Tibetan chanting, humming offers a mesmerising sonic experience. Then there are hums that resound regardless of human activity, such as the hums of impersonal objects and man-made or natural phenomena.The first sound studies book to explores the topic of humming, Humming offers a unique examination of the polarising categories of hums, from hums that are performed only to oneself, that are exercised in religious practice, that claim healing, and that resonate with our bodies, to hums that can drive people to madness, that emanate from cities and towns, and that resound in the universe. By acknowledging the quirkiness of hums within the established discourse in sound studies, Humming takes a truly interdisciplinary view on this familiar yet less-trodden sonic concept in sound studies.

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., 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., 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., 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.

Suk-Jun Kim is Lecturer in Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art and Programme Director of MMus in Sonic Arts at the University of Aberdeen, UK.