Donald Trump intensified my compulsion to write this book. He singularly generated so much negativity—so much so that I was sickened by his voice and could not bear to listen to the news. I felt compelled to locate pleasure in the world, wherever it might be found. It's so easy to dwell on the negative, to find fault, or to wag the finger of discontent at the politically regressive. And no doubt, there's some of that in the present volume. It's in our disciplinary DNA to do that.

Although we, in the field of cinema and media studies, emphasize the visual, and we presume that the field of vision is the site of the aesthetic experience, more often than not, what's really responsible for eliciting pleasurable affects is the audio design, and specifically, music. We tend to take music and audio design for granted and ascribe the affective experience to the visual imagery. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the visual field is unimportant, most certainly it is. However, because of audio's lektonic basis, its physical properties (sound waves touch us), it wields the most potential to elicit an affective response.

Alas, I am completely ignorant of music. I never learned to play a musical instrument (though I always wanted to). I have no capacity to read sheet music, or identify notes, or any other such thing. And this handicapped my ability to do the very thing that I set out to do (at least at certain points in the volume). I’m hopelessly ill-equipped. I have, nevertheless, been especially interested in music and sensitive to its affective power. As a youngster (I got my first record when I was 10 years old—an album that I still own and play to this day), a brooding teen, and a twenty-something goth kid I could—and very often did—listen to the same track over and over.