THEME Lecture: Toward a Theory of Nuclear Listening
Gabrielle Cornish, PhD
Assistant Professor of Musicologu, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Cornish uses the Chernobyl disaster as a starting point to set sound and music studies into dialogue with the deep history of radiation and nuclear arms testing in the twentieth century. Weaving together archival documents, oral history, and musical examples, Cornish shows how scientists, bureaucrats, artists, and ordinary citizens alike turned to sound to measure and better understand the atom’s potential in the Soviet Union and United States. She positions radiation as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013): an object that is so vast and immeasurable that it defies interpretation.

As something simultaneously both incomprehensible in scope and invisible to the human eye, radiation intersects with audile techniques in ways that help to illuminate changing epistemologies and political ecologies during the Cold War. Listening to the atom, Cornish argues, challenged historical actors to recalibrate their understandings of science, empiricism, and geopolitics.