Ours is a society inundated with noise, yet it is a force that remains largely unexamined. Its sheer ubiquity causes us to take it for granted. In her new memoir of essays, The Sound of Undoing, Paige Towers wrestles with the multiple meanings of sound. The book is organized thematically and progresses linearly. In an experimental flourish, Towers includes brief sections of related material at the end of each chapter. Steeped in research, these snippets encompass everything from scientific studies to biblical exegesis. With humor, grace, and intelligence, Towers filters her many experiences—from the ecstatic to the traumatic—through the medium of sound. 

Brimming with elegant musings, Towers weaves themes of interpersonal violence, religious fundamentalism, sexism, racism, and (quite delightfully) ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) into a complex portrait of the different soundscapes she's traversed. Towers modulates between a darkly humorous persona and a reflective one in order to highlight her complicated relationship with sound. 

One aspect of undoing that Towers explores is familial. After a Bible camp outing, Towers’s sister becomes a born-again Christian at age nine. Towers and her parents are dumbfounded by her transformation, and her sister takes to leaving Young Earth Creationist literature under the author’s pillow. Upset at her sister’s attempts to “save” her, Towers destroys the pamphlets with scissors. In an earlier section, hairdressing is described as a favorite game of the sisters, so the instrument of destruction becomes at once a symbol of sisterhood and of separation. The sounds of scissors and brushes gliding through hair are replaced with a years-long silence, an estrangement that Towers continues to grapple with.  

Towers’s early memories of sound are associated with her father's volcanic anger at the intrusiveness of loud noises. Towers places us in these unsettling moments with impressive verve. The image of a VCR becomes an effective symbol for Towers's wish to rewrite over certain memories and begin anew. Describing her father's passion for recording television programs and recording over them, Towers presents the reader with a type of digital palimpsest, ghostly and surreal: “As my father would play a clip of Lawrence Welk conducting a band, you could see the face of Richard Pryor onstage behind him, pushing through the image, grinning. Shapes lost their form. Electric pink, blue, and yellow squiggly lines flashed across the screen. And the sound garbled—it'd become too suddenly loud and then would go quiet.”

In the darkness of the basement, Towers’s father creates a carefully curated sound environment. The mute button grants him a mastery over unwanted sounds. Towers does an excellent job of detailing the idiosyncratic nature of noise sensitivity, emphasizing its unpredictability and breadth. In her father’s case, dialogue and music are frequent targets of his remote control. Visits to the basement become a sort of ritual between Towers and her father, representing an attempt to transcend the noise-induced anxiety that looms over the family. The analog Frankensteins he conjures are well-meaning attempts at bonding; nevertheless, his obsession with television is also about control. Towers and her family come to resemble the TV set, ever modulating their behavior to avoid upsetting her father. Unlike a noisy restaurant or grocery store, Towers writes, “You can control a family because they love you. They need you. They adjust.”   

Especially effective are her integrations of research on the impact of urban noise on humans and wildlife. She relates how the circadian rhythms of non-nocturnal birds are interrupted by city life. Staggering statistics concerning the high decibel level (95 dB) of midtown Manhattan accentuate the sound-shock of Towers's adjustment to New York City after moving there with her husband, Kumar, for his residency. In one haunting episode, Towers relates waking up one morning to a panoply of sounds. The wailing of a siren pierces the air, but then the sound abruptly switches to the high-pitched beep of a car alarm being triggered. "And then, ringing out in the early morning hours, there it was: nature's voice in the form of the oppressive urban landscape that had me unhinged, repeated back in solo pieces. A cruel joke." Looking out her window, she spots a northern mockingbird. It has learned the language of the city and, once again, the reader is presented with an unnerving simulacrum—the power of sound to invade living systems.   

A few years after her move to New York, Towers starts a Facebook group for listeners of YouTube ASMR, videos that include auditory and visual triggers such as inaudible whispering or finger flutters. Her hope is to create a community where ASMR aficionados can bond over their love for the genre. Only a few members RSVP, but she remains hopeful more will show up. Unfortunately, at an in-person meeting for the group, she arrives only to find a begrimed old man who's much more interested in her than YouTube videos. He reveals his penchant for stealing grocery carts before a younger man, sweaty and nervous, arrives. Alas, he watches ASMR because it "turns him on." The encounter marks a turning point in Towers’s reliance upon sound as a therapeutic crutch. Shortly thereafter she becomes immune to the trademark tingles of ASMR, committing herself to exercise, meditation, and talk therapy for alleviating her depression.

Towers confronts a conditioned, anxious response to noise throughout her journey toward peace, culminating in a visit to the Orfield Labs Quiet Chamber in Minneapolis, dubbed "the quietest place on Earth" by Guinness World Records. Towers hopes the lab’s silence will allow her to remember if she’d been abused as a child. Dogged by low self-esteem and depression, the author and her sister sense a discontinuity in their timelines. The chamber fails to dredge up childhood secrets, but Towers comes to a different realization about the function of sound. Awash in the darkness of the deprivation chamber, Towers understands that, despite its ability to annoy, sound acts as a perceptual mooring that grounds us in our existence. She observes, "Yet the total lack of sound, more than my loss of sight, made me feel deeply vulnerable. In its absence for the first time ever, I realized that sound is a protective blanket, as all-encompassing as amniotic fluid." Towers’ sister confirms the suspicions of childhood abuse after recovering a series of repressed memories. In a stunning braided passage, Towers compares the soundlessness of the Orfield Chamber with her sister’s revelation. Within the silence of the chamber, Towers could hear her blood pump and air enter her lungs. Something from nothing. Towers remains unable to remember the incident, but her sister's memory is the sound of her heart beating in the chamber, a murmur of noise contained within the silence. 

Towers’s return to the Midwest figures heavily in the latter sections of the book. Kumar matches for a fellowship in Milwaukee, and the couple anticipate a welcome respite from the bustle of Manhattan. Instead, in their new home, they find themselves lamenting the death of two young people, one a poet and the other a thirteen-year-old girl, both victims of gun violence. But what does inner-city violence have to do with sound? Towers deftly uses ShotSpotter, a nationwide system of sensors for pinpointing the location of gunshots, as a metaphor for America’s epidemic of mass shootings. She characterizes the network as a symbol of technologized indifference, able to detect violence but not prevent it: “Here, hear, lies the apathy: the acoustic sensors record without stopping. Allow me the homophone. Whatever happens, there is no moment of silence. No respect for a family’s grief. No end. Who knows whether an alert was sent or whether it would have made a difference?”  

The Sound of Undoing marks the emergence of a bold voice in creative nonfiction. It asks us to turn our collective ears to the cacophonous and the sonorous, the mundane and the sublime. Towers breathes new life into the familiar soundscape of our modern existence, asking us to rediscover the wondrousness of our sound-filled world.