FIRST OF ALL: The book has almost zero to do with dubstep, and dancefloors are just one chapter.
What it's really about is how low-frequencies recast sensoria and surroundings and how people in various times and places have experimented with that, developing technologies and strategies for exploiting and intensifying those effects, for various purposes. It draws on sciences of sensation and acoustics, histories of sound technologies, philosophies of materiality and a lot of other things.
I started by looking at sound system cultures, but when you start following
vibration around - across time, cultures - you end up discovering a lot of peculiar stuff that's usually mentioned only passingly, as a curiosity, and that's never been examined in any sustained way.
So the largest chapter is on ritual/religious uses uses of low tones and bass-making technologies (there's a section on pipe organs, for example; another on burial mounds acting as massive, earthen Helmholtz resonators, 600 000lb bells and so on). Another chapter looks at sub-perceptual waves implicated in various sorts of hauntings ('ghosts', hums, etc.), piecing together offhand comments by scientists about eerie presence-absence effects of infrasound that have never been properly followed up. Then sound art and experimental musics looks at how artists made taken vibratory perception as their medium.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/low-end-theory-9781501335914/
CONTENTS:
1. The Sonic Body: An Ethico-Acoustic Toolkit
Sonorous Relations
Tales and Strategies
Myth-Science in the Vibratory Milieu
2. Spectral Catalysis: Disquieting Encounters
Spectres of the Manmade Unknown
Infrasound
Unhomed
Boo! (toward an operative reality)
The Hum
'And it was only by analogy that it could be called a sound at all...'
Blinkered Science
We still do not know what a sonic body can do...
3. Numinous Strategies
Learning to Play the Sonic Body
The Nervous Piano
Numinous Instruments
Religious Audiogenesis
Numinous Sound Design
Playing the Resonances
Tellurian Organs
The Organ-Church Assemblage
The Arcanum: An Ambulant Myth-Science
The Nervous Organ
Baroque Affect Engineering
The Gothic Assemblage: Applied Synaesthetics
4. Tone Scientists I: Vibratory Arts
Cymatic Arts
Documentary Practices
A Speculative Turn
Perceptual Abstraction
Transversal Strategies
Incipient Dance
Sonic Architectures
Dance With the Speaker
'A people of oscillators'
5. Tone Scientists II: Bass Cults
The Lab
The Science
Bass Science
Dubplates and Mastering
Engineering the Vibratorium
Affects and Affectations
Entering the Rhythmachine
Three Physio-Logics
Jungle (1994)
Dubstep (2005)
Footwork (2009)