Musicians and traditional doctors in Siem Reap, Cambodia, utter a mantra in whispers, murmurs, and acoustic silence to bolster their memory. This paper analyzes that mantra and the widespread Cambodian vocal practice that practitioners term “speaking in the heart” (niyāy knung citt) to explore theoretically how the borders between what is heard and what goes unheard can break down and how people’s capacities and very beings are composed of relations kept with deities and the dead. What becomes audible when we tune our ears to realms of sound cordoned off as silence? What comes into being when the abundantly loud and the acoustically inaudible coalesce, the efficacy of one complementing the other? Building on Stoller’s (1989) and Ochoa Gautier’s (2015) work on sounds that are inaudible through human cochlear means, I offer “sonic spectrality” to encapsulate how acoustics and what I term “non-acoustic sound” operate separately and intermix to ontologically conjoin the living and dead. Illustrating how various pasts in the form of the dead are components of people’s selves that are enlivened through non-acoustic sound, I put forward an alternative mode of personhood and push music and sound studies beyond historicism. I then consider how non-acoustic sound pertains to gendered politics in Cambodian-Buddhist rituals, as women negotiate the loud sounds of patriarchal power structures through utterances that go unheard by other human auditors. Based on ethnographic research in Cambodia, I offer sonic spectrality and non-acoustic sound to examine an otherwise world of sound and its multitude of social possibilities.

This paper underhears the quiet voice. While underhearing elicits potential ethnographic concern over the deleterious ramifications of epistemological lack—where the incommensurability between subjects becomes amplified through characterizations of inattention, mishearing, and misinterpretation—I follow scholars who nuance these delineations (Berlant 2022, Larkin 2014, Martell 2017, Pederson 2021) to discern the generative potential invoked at these relational lapses. Drawing from fieldwork in South Korea on the interrelation of voice and labor precarity, I argue that underhearing voices at the edge of legibility registers the productive means by which Koreans work to ensure the continuation of life. Witnessing my informant “Ahin” in the wake of her witnessing a failed suicide attempt by her closest friend in her home, I articulate how increasingly alienated subjects aurally (re)iterate modes of intimate belonging as the act of witnessing suicide continuously (re)wound already vulnerable socialities (Solomon 2022). Underhearing fragmented vocalizations of “Ahin” contending with unhearable resonances of suicidal screams that linger in the quietude of her home, I articulate how quiet voicings—whispering, subvocal singing, breathing; unintended for any particular listener—resound as a minor means to cultivate fleeting lines of consistency in life as major forms of stability—sociality, home, care—recurrently remind of its propensity to resolve into destabilizing conditions of chaos (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, Grosz 2008). Opining the durational production of life through quiet voicings rather than demurring its semantic or analytical lack (Bergson 1946), I challenge the ontological associations between chaos and loudness, recognizing how chaos—and individual contestations to its destabilization—resounds across thresholds of audibility.

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in decreased attendance at the Shabbat prayers and liturgies of Sofia Synagogue, the sole temple serving Bulgaria’s capital’s (largely Sephardic) Jewish community. Based on fieldwork in 2021 with the few regularly attending men and women, this paper thinks with two formulations of quiet, one marked by minor presence (Beer 2015), the other by commitment to a larger community (Kligman 2009). Amidah prayers are recited “whispering” to the Lord, the lips moving but the voice speaking only in the heart; this avoids assuming that God needs sound and avoids disrupting the larger group’s concentration, which would risk elevating the individual into a figure in the minority, e.g. a shouting false prophet (“One who says the [Amidah] so that it can be heard is of the small faith” - Berakhot 24). Concentrating and remaining quiet enough were simpler in the low-density congregation of those willing to follow vaccination protocols and risk attending, but worshippers regretted the low numbers during sung prayers, which resulted in “not much melody.” I argue that conceiving melody (rather than Bulgarian language’s typical “quiet/strong” dichotomy) as a register of volume allows it to operate in parallel to theories of whispering’s intensification of voiced belief. Tracing these theories’ practiced relationality demonstrates not only loudness’s dangerously minor resonance—suggesting quiet’s normalization outside parameters of reduction and constraint that might otherwise define it—but also the situational shifts in attention that reposition minor sounds along alternative registers of sonic practice, marking absence in ways not neatly aligned with silence.