Review: Annoying Music in Everyday Life, by Felipe Trotta

Annoying Music in Everyday Life is an engaging, interdisciplinary contribution to the growing body of scholarship centered on music and/as violence. Using the concept of irritating music as a jumping-off point, Felipe Trotta’s investigation encompasses questions of public and private space, value formation, taste, power, control, and otherness. Foundational sound studies texts have homed in on music’s harmful attributes and effects within specific traumatic circumstances such as torture and warfare; Trotta builds on this work and pivots toward the commonplace. He is still concerned with the power dynamics at play within musical experiences, but focuses instead on the quotidian ways in which music becomes a tool for control. Drawing from philosophy, sound studies, and qualitative ethnography, Trotta delves into the idea of “annoying music” as a synecdoche for broader social and interpersonal relationships. He adopts a wide-ranging approach to annoying music, querying its social, moral, and legal dimensions in both...