Keywords: Sound Studies - Posthuman Listening - Experimental Radio
Affiliation: Arizona State University
Daniel Gilfillan is Associate Professor of German Studies at Arizona State University and Senior Global Futures Scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. His interdisciplinary research bridges sound studies, media history, and environmental humanities, with particular focus on experimental radio theory, acoustic ecology, and posthumanist approaches to environmental crisis.
His first book, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), examines German experimental radio as an artistic medium, exploring how broadcast technologies shaped cultural production and knowledge transmission in the twentieth century. The volume analyzes radio's development as a space for artistic experimentation, from Weimar-era innovations through postwar collaborative networks between Vienna and Belgrade.
Gilfillan’s current book project, The Unsung Planet: Resilience, Resonance, and Our Sonic Imagination, develops his concept of “unsinging” to explore the notions of sonic decomposition and decay. The manuscript investigates how sound functions as both a distinguishing factor within the Anthropocene and a diagnostic tool to gauge its impact. Through acoustic examples exploring entanglements with plants, animals, geologies, and atmospheres, the project reimagines human resilience alongside the nonhuman.
His scholarly essays have appeared in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Cosmos as a Journal, Journal of Jewish Identities, and numerous edited volumes. Recent work includes “Unsinging the Planet: Sonic Decomposition in Two Austrian Soundscapes,” “Prima facie Deception: The Immediacy of the Face in Two Nazi Propaganda Films,” and “Broadcast Space as Exophonic Space: Transcultural Radio, Migration, and Itinerant Thought.” He also served as scientific advisor for metamusic, a three-year Austrian Science Fund project with the sound/radio arts collective alien productions and researchers at the University of Art and Design in Linz, developing interactive music installations for grey parrots. Gilfillan's scholarship foregrounds how sound practices reveal critical ecological relationships and open sonic imaginations to entanglements within and beyond the human.