Stay Tuned

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms—asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: Namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions—forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself—expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.