1st Edition

Polisonics Collective Listening and the Politics of Sound

Edited By Matt Lewis, Manal Massalha Copyright 2026
224 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Focal Press

224 Pages 13 B/W Illustrations
by Focal Press

Bringing together contributors with backgrounds in ethnography, theatre, design, music, and sound, Polisonics: Collective Listening and the Politics of Sound demonstrates the importance of sound in design and how the sonic offers alternatives to dominant, singular, and technologically determined narratives. From sonic street interventions to rural field recording, water fountains to community... Read more

Introduction


1. Sounding and Listening in Place: Four Events in the Nottingdale Community After the Grenfell Tower Fire

Cecilia Wee

2. A Manifesto for Integrating Audio Description in Design Practice

Harshadha Balasubramanian

3. For Sound to Emanate from Sites: Or, Some Notes on Black Sonic Bildung 

Nathanael Kliebhan

4. Re-Situating Machine Listening: The Question of "Justice" in the Voice Biometry Apparatus of the German Asylum System

Pedro JS Vieira de Oliveira and Shintaro Miyazaki

5. Speaking Thr-o-ugh: Putting it Out, Speaking, Listening, Disrupting?

Laura Mello, Mariana Carvalho, Nirah Pomar, and Elif Soğuksu

6. Hearing the Difference: Tradition, Futurity, and the Black Time of Sounding in Channel One Sound System’s Sessions

Brian D’Aquino

7. Ethnographies of Listening: Settler-Colonial Violence, Erasure, and Convivial Possibilities

Manal Massalha

8. Noise (Unk)now(n)

Rosie Ash

9. Soundwashing

Matt Lewis

Biography

Matt Lewis is an artist and researcher based in Margate and London. Informed by a background in music, he is passionate about the importance of coming together in groups to make things happen. He has a PhD from Goldsmiths and works at the Royal College of Art in London, where he teaches sound and is part of the Voicing Sound research group.

Manal Massalha is a London-based sociologist, urban ethnographer, and social documentary photographer/videographer. Manal holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and her practice explores the everyday and the mundane, the human and the urban, the cultural and the social, and the political and the economic.