‘Sllt’ says the machine in a print shop in Joyce's Ulysses, prompting Bloom's reflection, ‘Everything speaks in its own way’. This takes place in the ‘Aeolus’ section of Joyce's novel, but receives full-scale elaboration hundreds of pages later in ‘Circe’, a hallucinatory section largely set in a Dublin brothel. Here, everything indeed does speak in its own way, including a gas jet (‘Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!’, ‘Pwfungg!’), a timepiece (‘Cuckoo. / Cuckoo. / Cuckoo’.), a nanny goat (‘Megegaggegg! Nannannanny!’), trees, a waterfall, a door handle, and a gong – and this is far from an exhaustive list. ‘Walls have hears’, Bloom says at one point, punningly summing up the conceit of the whole section: that inanimate objects, no less than animate ones, are both sensible and cognisant of sound; as such, they not only listen to one another, but also make various critical, satirical, assenting, dissenting or at any rate responsive sounds in turn (p. 421). In the present book's ‘Introduction’, we saw how such sounds exemplify Douglas Kahn's category ‘all sound’, and how acknowledging this takes us some way towards understanding the ‘modernity’ of modern sound – but here, my interest in them concerns the way that all these sounds, in Joyce's imagining, are thoroughly and irrepressibly social. As ‘Circe’ unfolds, all sorts of human and inhuman ‘speakers’ are variously laughed at, heckled, cheered, questioned or impugned. Almost nobody, and no thing, speaks without some form of answer.