“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live”.

Thus begins the essay where the author of Invisible Man describes everything he hears in his “tiny” ground floor apartment in the early days of his writing career. There’s a lot to be heard, and Ellison – a hi-fi obsessive – gets into an ongoing battle with a nearby singer by playing his own versions of the songs she practises. But their eventual face-to-face meeting takes an unexpected turn.

I was made aware of this essay in the book Phonographies by Alexander Weheliye, who says that Ellison gives us “insight, or more accurately, “inhearing”, into the acoustic geography of [his] apartment”. It’s one of those essays that changed my relationship with domestic sounds, and instilled a permanent urge to visit an audio equipment shop in 1949. This was a time, as Ellison says, when “between the hi-fi record and the ear […] there was a new electronic world”.

Collected in Shadow and Act, Random House, 1994