CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 2: Hope as Very Low Frequency Practice (A Side): Listening as Being-With Uncertainty -- CHAPTER 3: Hope as Very Low Frequency Practice (Side B): Listening as Longing to Be Undone -- CHAPTER 4: Hospicing Hope in Education: Swansongs, Sustainability, and a Pedagogical Ethic of Listening -- CHAPTER 5: What do I Hear, and How do I listen? Thinking with Sound on the Lachine Canal -- CHAPTER 6: Extremity, Hope, and Sound in the Colonial Experience -- CHAPTER 7: Musicking as a Radical Act of Hope: An Arts-Based Theoretical Reflection -- CHAPTER 8: “Back to 1999:” Exploring Speculative Nostalgia with Hyperpop -- CHAPTER 9: Nothing, But Hope: A Conversation -- CHAPTER 10. Weird Horizons: Sound Research at the Sonic Brink.

This edited collection takes the prompt “hope in crisis” as a starting point for investigating sound research as it is situated in these troubling times. Bringing together thinkers from communication studies, art education, creative arts therapy, psychology, and philosophy, this book positions sound research as a question, one to which the authors respond through both material and conceptual experiments with sonic practices. Central to the project is the question of how to collectively and creatively engage with the increasingly difficult— even untenable—circumstances that have come to limit future possibilities, both within fields of research but also beyond, without falling back on the unquestioned assumption that hope alone will actualize a desired otherworld. The sound research gathered here experiments with such possibilities in order to grapple with how present conditions, including conditions for research, are always contingent—always already in trouble—and thus also subject to change both conceptually and materially. jessie beier (PhD) is a teacher, artist, researcher, philosopher, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for unthought futures. She is an Assistant Professor in Art Education at Concordia University (Montréal) and author of the book Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023). jessie’s artistic practice deploys sonic, video, textual, illustrated, and relational elements to stage speculative scenarios and immersive, site-specific installations. Owen Chapman (PhD) is a composer, DJ, and researcher. He is a Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montréal) and his writings have appeared in publications including the Canadian Journal of Communication, Esse, Media-N, and Organised Sound. His audio work involves live performance and electronic composition and has been featured internationally in video soundtracks, media workshops, site-specific installations, as well as solo and group performances.