Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164809
- eISBN:
- 9781400873869
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164809.003.0013
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines “sound” and “hearing” in relation to silence and deafness. Sound studies and Deaf studies would seem, at first perception, to operate in worlds apart. Sound studies privileges ...
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This chapter examines “sound” and “hearing” in relation to silence and deafness. Sound studies and Deaf studies would seem, at first perception, to operate in worlds apart. Sound studies privileges attention to listening and hearing in cultural experience, whereas Deaf studies emphasizes the visual, particularly as a space of communicative practice. The chapter considers four major practices that might prompt scholars in sound studies and Deaf studies into conversation. These practices ask how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice; how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deaf–hearing dichotomies; how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound; and how signing, non-speech-based communicative practices, and listening might unwind phonocentric models of speech and move analysis away from the simple frame of “speech communities.” The chapter concludes by asking how to move beyond the ear and eye, rethinking the subjects of sound and Deaf studies.Less
This chapter examines “sound” and “hearing” in relation to silence and deafness. Sound studies and Deaf studies would seem, at first perception, to operate in worlds apart. Sound studies privileges attention to listening and hearing in cultural experience, whereas Deaf studies emphasizes the visual, particularly as a space of communicative practice. The chapter considers four major practices that might prompt scholars in sound studies and Deaf studies into conversation. These practices ask how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice; how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deaf–hearing dichotomies; how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound; and how signing, non-speech-based communicative practices, and listening might unwind phonocentric models of speech and move analysis away from the simple frame of “speech communities.” The chapter concludes by asking how to move beyond the ear and eye, rethinking the subjects of sound and Deaf studies.
Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199759392
- eISBN:
- 9780199918911
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759392.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The increasing popularity of the field of Sound Studies marks the sonic turn in cultural studies since the millennium. This compilation draws on a number of diverse fields, including journalism, ...
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The increasing popularity of the field of Sound Studies marks the sonic turn in cultural studies since the millennium. This compilation draws on a number of diverse fields, including journalism, history, cultural studies, music, architecture, and art history, to ask what Germany sounds like. The book is divided into five sections, organized thematically. The first section, “New Sounds in the Twentieth Century,” considers the rise of urban sound in the early 1900s and the radio play in the post-war years. Section two, “Defining Space through Sound,” focuses on the interactions between sound and space, particularly the very different soundscapes of the battlefield and the concert hall. Section three considers the divergent sounds of East and West Germany, through interviews and literature, and section four, “The Politics of Sound,” deals with music in socialist East Germany and the power structures inherent in acoustic surveillance. Finally, “Soundscapers of the Millennium” looks at sound art and hip-hop as two examples of the creative and political possibility of sound. Together the chapters consider the acoustic fingerprint of Germany, the cultural significance of sounds and space in the German context, spanning more than a century from the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s to today. This book is designed as an introduction to the topic and is accompanied by online teaching materials.Less
The increasing popularity of the field of Sound Studies marks the sonic turn in cultural studies since the millennium. This compilation draws on a number of diverse fields, including journalism, history, cultural studies, music, architecture, and art history, to ask what Germany sounds like. The book is divided into five sections, organized thematically. The first section, “New Sounds in the Twentieth Century,” considers the rise of urban sound in the early 1900s and the radio play in the post-war years. Section two, “Defining Space through Sound,” focuses on the interactions between sound and space, particularly the very different soundscapes of the battlefield and the concert hall. Section three considers the divergent sounds of East and West Germany, through interviews and literature, and section four, “The Politics of Sound,” deals with music in socialist East Germany and the power structures inherent in acoustic surveillance. Finally, “Soundscapers of the Millennium” looks at sound art and hip-hop as two examples of the creative and political possibility of sound. Together the chapters consider the acoustic fingerprint of Germany, the cultural significance of sounds and space in the German context, spanning more than a century from the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s to today. This book is designed as an introduction to the topic and is accompanied by online teaching materials.
Sean Zdenek
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226312644
- eISBN:
- 9780226312811
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226312811.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Situated at the intersection of a number of competing discourses and perspectives, closed captioning offers a key location for exploring the rhetoric of disability in the age of digital media. ...
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Situated at the intersection of a number of competing discourses and perspectives, closed captioning offers a key location for exploring the rhetoric of disability in the age of digital media. Reading Sounds offers the first extended study of closed captioning from a humanistic perspective. Instead of treating closed captioning as a legal requirement, a technical problem, or a matter of simple transcription, this book considers how captioning can be a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Reading Sounds positions closed captioning as a significant variable in multimodal analysis, questions narrow definitions that reduce captioning to the mere “display” of text on the screen, broadens current treatments of quality captioning, and explores captioning as a complex rhetorical and interpretative practice. This book argues that captioners not only select which sounds are significant, and hence which sounds are worthy of being captioned, but also rhetorically invent words for sounds. Drawing on a number of examples from a range of popular movies and television shows, Reading Sounds develops a rhetorical sensitivity to the interactions among sounds, captions, contexts, constraints, writers, and readers.Less
Situated at the intersection of a number of competing discourses and perspectives, closed captioning offers a key location for exploring the rhetoric of disability in the age of digital media. Reading Sounds offers the first extended study of closed captioning from a humanistic perspective. Instead of treating closed captioning as a legal requirement, a technical problem, or a matter of simple transcription, this book considers how captioning can be a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Reading Sounds positions closed captioning as a significant variable in multimodal analysis, questions narrow definitions that reduce captioning to the mere “display” of text on the screen, broadens current treatments of quality captioning, and explores captioning as a complex rhetorical and interpretative practice. This book argues that captioners not only select which sounds are significant, and hence which sounds are worthy of being captioned, but also rhetorically invent words for sounds. Drawing on a number of examples from a range of popular movies and television shows, Reading Sounds develops a rhetorical sensitivity to the interactions among sounds, captions, contexts, constraints, writers, and readers.
John Mowitt
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520284623
- eISBN:
- 9780520960404
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284623.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as ...
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This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. The text looks into the fact that beyond hearing and listening we “audit” sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of “sound studies.” To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound—including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence—to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making.Less
This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. The text looks into the fact that beyond hearing and listening we “audit” sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of “sound studies.” To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound—including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence—to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making.
Ying Xiao
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812605
- eISBN:
- 9781496812643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812605.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The introduction begins by lays out the theoretical and historical framework of this research, surveying the disciplines of globalization (Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson), sound studies (Michel ...
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The introduction begins by lays out the theoretical and historical framework of this research, surveying the disciplines of globalization (Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson), sound studies (Michel Chion), Chinese film studies (Rey Chow, Zhang Yingjin, Zhang Zhen, Dai Jinhua), cinema and media studies (André Bazin, Miriam Hansen, Gilles Deleuze), and literary and cultural studies (Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Baktin, Michel Foucault, Dick Hebdige, Slavoj Žižek). The chapter then identifies and foregrounds the critical research questions, key arguments, methodologies, and original contributions of this project. It proposes “the critical adoption of sound” and “global vernacularism” as the key concepts to highlight the necessity of integrating sound into visual and media studies and as a new perspective to re-examine and re-evaluate Chinese local experiences in relation to the Hollywood model and to a wide range of socio-cultural phenomena, perceptions, and media affected by the process of modernization and globalization.Less
The introduction begins by lays out the theoretical and historical framework of this research, surveying the disciplines of globalization (Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson), sound studies (Michel Chion), Chinese film studies (Rey Chow, Zhang Yingjin, Zhang Zhen, Dai Jinhua), cinema and media studies (André Bazin, Miriam Hansen, Gilles Deleuze), and literary and cultural studies (Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Baktin, Michel Foucault, Dick Hebdige, Slavoj Žižek). The chapter then identifies and foregrounds the critical research questions, key arguments, methodologies, and original contributions of this project. It proposes “the critical adoption of sound” and “global vernacularism” as the key concepts to highlight the necessity of integrating sound into visual and media studies and as a new perspective to re-examine and re-evaluate Chinese local experiences in relation to the Hollywood model and to a wide range of socio-cultural phenomena, perceptions, and media affected by the process of modernization and globalization.
Simone Tosoni and Trevor Pinch
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035279
- eISBN:
- 9780262336550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035279.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
The final chapter of the book discusses Trevor Pinch’s more recent works, and addresses three main topics. The first one is the topic of selling, on which the author returns after the mid ‘80s works ...
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The final chapter of the book discusses Trevor Pinch’s more recent works, and addresses three main topics. The first one is the topic of selling, on which the author returns after the mid ‘80s works on market selling. The primary focus is now on the skills and knowledge involved in the practices of selling. In particular, the chapter addresses the translation and adaptation of skill from a material setting of selling to another (from street market to television sales), and some peculiar forms of knowledge like Territorial Knowledge. A discussion on the relevance of sound in selling introduces the reader to the second topic of the chapter: sound studies. The chapter presents their origin, their main current tendencies, and Pinch’s own trajectories in the field of research, from the work on the social construction of the Moog synthesizer to the inquiries on the stabilization of sound. Finally, the chapter discusses the recent proposal of an ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the related accusations of “perspectivism” opposed to social constructivist approaches like Social Construction of Technology (SCOT).Less
The final chapter of the book discusses Trevor Pinch’s more recent works, and addresses three main topics. The first one is the topic of selling, on which the author returns after the mid ‘80s works on market selling. The primary focus is now on the skills and knowledge involved in the practices of selling. In particular, the chapter addresses the translation and adaptation of skill from a material setting of selling to another (from street market to television sales), and some peculiar forms of knowledge like Territorial Knowledge. A discussion on the relevance of sound in selling introduces the reader to the second topic of the chapter: sound studies. The chapter presents their origin, their main current tendencies, and Pinch’s own trajectories in the field of research, from the work on the social construction of the Moog synthesizer to the inquiries on the stabilization of sound. Finally, the chapter discusses the recent proposal of an ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the related accusations of “perspectivism” opposed to social constructivist approaches like Social Construction of Technology (SCOT).
Michael B. Silvers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042089
- eISBN:
- 9780252050831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042089.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the ...
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Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the northeast region of Brazil, primarily the state of Ceará. The book traces the articulations of music and sound with drought as a discourse, a matter of politics, and a material reality. It encompasses multiple entwined issues, including ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to vital resources such as water, along with corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and rapidly expanding neoliberalism. Each chapter is a case study: the use of carnauba wax, formed by palm trees as a protective climate adaptation, in the production of wax cylinder sound recordings in the late nineteenth century; the political significance of regionalist popular music, especially baião and forró, in the mid-twentieth century; forró music and practices of weather forecasting that involve listening to bird calls; the production and meaning of the soundscape of a small city as it involves musician Raimundo Fagner; social and musical change at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the cancellation of state-sponsored Carnival celebrations due to a costly multi-year drought in the 2010s. Demonstrating how ecological crisis affects musical culture by way of and proportionate to social difference and stratification, the book advocates a focus on environmental justice in ecomusicological scholarship.Less
Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the northeast region of Brazil, primarily the state of Ceará. The book traces the articulations of music and sound with drought as a discourse, a matter of politics, and a material reality. It encompasses multiple entwined issues, including ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to vital resources such as water, along with corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and rapidly expanding neoliberalism. Each chapter is a case study: the use of carnauba wax, formed by palm trees as a protective climate adaptation, in the production of wax cylinder sound recordings in the late nineteenth century; the political significance of regionalist popular music, especially baião and forró, in the mid-twentieth century; forró music and practices of weather forecasting that involve listening to bird calls; the production and meaning of the soundscape of a small city as it involves musician Raimundo Fagner; social and musical change at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the cancellation of state-sponsored Carnival celebrations due to a costly multi-year drought in the 2010s. Demonstrating how ecological crisis affects musical culture by way of and proportionate to social difference and stratification, the book advocates a focus on environmental justice in ecomusicological scholarship.
John Mowitt
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520284623
- eISBN:
- 9780520960404
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284623.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of sound studies. According to Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, editors of “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” “Sound Studies is an ...
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This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of sound studies. According to Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, editors of “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” “Sound Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, noise, silence and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does so from a much wider perspective than standard disciplines such as ethnomusicology, history of music and the sociology of music.” This book presents a different approach to sound studies. It deliberates whether the conceptual construct of the audit helps people think about the degree to which sound, and the very distinction between hearing and listening, belong to a materialization of discourse with which academic intellectuals are intimate—discipline.Less
This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of sound studies. According to Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, editors of “Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music,” “Sound Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, noise, silence and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does so from a much wider perspective than standard disciplines such as ethnomusicology, history of music and the sociology of music.” This book presents a different approach to sound studies. It deliberates whether the conceptual construct of the audit helps people think about the degree to which sound, and the very distinction between hearing and listening, belong to a materialization of discourse with which academic intellectuals are intimate—discipline.
Helen Groth, Julian Murphet, and Penelope Hone
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474416368
- eISBN:
- 9781474434591
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416368.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers what it means to attend to the dynamics and aesthetics of sonic mediation in modern writing, acoustic, and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth ...
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This chapter considers what it means to attend to the dynamics and aesthetics of sonic mediation in modern writing, acoustic, and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the various transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound across a range of forms opens up a space for new ways of understanding both the specific sonorous qualities that different modern media are capable of registering, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the techniques with which human subjects respond to modern soundscapes. We begin with some methodological groundwork for the analysis of literature’s historically complex relationship to extra-literary sounds, and by identifying parallels and divergences with other media, such as the phonograph, radio and cinema. The challenges facing any correlation between modernist technique and the specific soundscapes of modernity are particularly demanding, not least because entirely new storage devices emerged simultaneously to do what literature could not, namely, record them. And yet, it was precisely this challenge that drove writers to engage as never before with what the symbolic apparatus of written language had never yet properly grasped: the vocal textures, rhythmic mechanizations, and stochastic accidents of real, socially embodied sound.Less
This chapter considers what it means to attend to the dynamics and aesthetics of sonic mediation in modern writing, acoustic, and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the various transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound across a range of forms opens up a space for new ways of understanding both the specific sonorous qualities that different modern media are capable of registering, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the techniques with which human subjects respond to modern soundscapes. We begin with some methodological groundwork for the analysis of literature’s historically complex relationship to extra-literary sounds, and by identifying parallels and divergences with other media, such as the phonograph, radio and cinema. The challenges facing any correlation between modernist technique and the specific soundscapes of modernity are particularly demanding, not least because entirely new storage devices emerged simultaneously to do what literature could not, namely, record them. And yet, it was precisely this challenge that drove writers to engage as never before with what the symbolic apparatus of written language had never yet properly grasped: the vocal textures, rhythmic mechanizations, and stochastic accidents of real, socially embodied sound.
Nilo Couret
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520296848
- eISBN:
- 9780520969162
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296848.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of modernity on the experience of time provide a backdrop for my discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. More ...
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The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of modernity on the experience of time provide a backdrop for my discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. More specifically, Sandrini’s films rely on the comedian’s stutter that literally disrupts the temporal continuum that film records. This chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts, material film practice, spectatorial experience, and historiography. Radio sound aesthetics and sound technologies played an important role during the transition to sound, not only determining technological developments that affected film production, but also providing the material base for the nation’s nascent studios. Additionally, by focusing on Sandrini’s physical slapstick, this chapter discusses his films as staging a confrontation with standardized time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the standardization of film through the registration gate. Classical Hollywood may have aspired to a hermetic diegetic world, but Sandrini mocks classicism with a stutter that makes the world salient precisely because it acknowledges that the world “slips through our fingers.”Less
The modernization of an increasingly urban and industrial Argentina and the effect of modernity on the experience of time provide a backdrop for my discussion of the films of Luis Sandrini. More specifically, Sandrini’s films rely on the comedian’s stutter that literally disrupts the temporal continuum that film records. This chapter uses the stutter heuristically, figuring it within film texts, material film practice, spectatorial experience, and historiography. Radio sound aesthetics and sound technologies played an important role during the transition to sound, not only determining technological developments that affected film production, but also providing the material base for the nation’s nascent studios. Additionally, by focusing on Sandrini’s physical slapstick, this chapter discusses his films as staging a confrontation with standardized time both in terms of the reification of time in modernity and the standardization of film through the registration gate. Classical Hollywood may have aspired to a hermetic diegetic world, but Sandrini mocks classicism with a stutter that makes the world salient precisely because it acknowledges that the world “slips through our fingers.”
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781526142122
- eISBN:
- 9781526155535
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526142139.00007
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
Using Michel Chion’s concept of an ‘audiovisual contract’ as a framework, this chapter explore the broader questions of how sound and image, as well as listening and seeing, interact to produce ...
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Using Michel Chion’s concept of an ‘audiovisual contract’ as a framework, this chapter explore the broader questions of how sound and image, as well as listening and seeing, interact to produce meaning in experimental media art. These questions are considered within the specific context of cinema and media studies, art history and art criticism, sound studies, as well as more specialized discussions, including the ‘sound art’ versus ‘sound in art’ debate. This introductory chapter argues that experimental media art today generates new relationships between sound and image that both challenge the ocularcentric assumptions art and media scholarship, while pointing to the possibility of larger paradigmatic shifts in the human sciences that can destabilize the visual hegemony. This chapter also outlines the structure of the book, highlighting the flow of its main arguments and connections among individual chapters.Less
Using Michel Chion’s concept of an ‘audiovisual contract’ as a framework, this chapter explore the broader questions of how sound and image, as well as listening and seeing, interact to produce meaning in experimental media art. These questions are considered within the specific context of cinema and media studies, art history and art criticism, sound studies, as well as more specialized discussions, including the ‘sound art’ versus ‘sound in art’ debate. This introductory chapter argues that experimental media art today generates new relationships between sound and image that both challenge the ocularcentric assumptions art and media scholarship, while pointing to the possibility of larger paradigmatic shifts in the human sciences that can destabilize the visual hegemony. This chapter also outlines the structure of the book, highlighting the flow of its main arguments and connections among individual chapters.
Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs, and Gijs Mom
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199925698
- eISBN:
- 9780199350155
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199925698.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Psychology of Music
This chapter sets the stage by claiming that the relative silence in our noise-controlled cars secludes us from the world, while the sound of car radio, warning signals and other audio information ...
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This chapter sets the stage by claiming that the relative silence in our noise-controlled cars secludes us from the world, while the sound of car radio, warning signals and other audio information connects us to it. Many of us thoroughly love the auditory privacy that comes with it: the ability to control the sounds that enter our auditory domain. This enables us to dwell in acoustic cocooning and find sonic relief in the car, to enjoy moments in which we can relax with help of sound and music in between home and work. Yet how did we, as a society, manage to turn the car, once a highly noisy vehicle, into a listening booth? After introducingthis question, Chapter One explains how the bookdraws on Sound Studies, Sensory Studies, Mobility Culture, and History of Technology to answer it, and how the study is structured.Less
This chapter sets the stage by claiming that the relative silence in our noise-controlled cars secludes us from the world, while the sound of car radio, warning signals and other audio information connects us to it. Many of us thoroughly love the auditory privacy that comes with it: the ability to control the sounds that enter our auditory domain. This enables us to dwell in acoustic cocooning and find sonic relief in the car, to enjoy moments in which we can relax with help of sound and music in between home and work. Yet how did we, as a society, manage to turn the car, once a highly noisy vehicle, into a listening booth? After introducingthis question, Chapter One explains how the bookdraws on Sound Studies, Sensory Studies, Mobility Culture, and History of Technology to answer it, and how the study is structured.
James G. Mansell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040672
- eISBN:
- 9780252099113
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040672.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This introductory chapter outlines what early twentieth-century Britons meant when they referred to their “age of noise”. It situates the book in the field of sound studies and especially historical ...
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This introductory chapter outlines what early twentieth-century Britons meant when they referred to their “age of noise”. It situates the book in the field of sound studies and especially historical sound studies and outlines the central themes dealt with in the main chapters of the book: sound and modernity; sound and selfhood; and competition between auditory experts in situating ideals for sonic modernity. The chapter introduces the “ways of hearing” approach adopted in the book, explaining what it means to listen with rather than listen to the pastLess
This introductory chapter outlines what early twentieth-century Britons meant when they referred to their “age of noise”. It situates the book in the field of sound studies and especially historical sound studies and outlines the central themes dealt with in the main chapters of the book: sound and modernity; sound and selfhood; and competition between auditory experts in situating ideals for sonic modernity. The chapter introduces the “ways of hearing” approach adopted in the book, explaining what it means to listen with rather than listen to the past
Simone Tosoni and Trevor Pinch
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035279
- eISBN:
- 9780262336550
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035279.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social ...
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Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.Less
Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.
Nilo Couret
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520296848
- eISBN:
- 9780520969162
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520296848.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case ...
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The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies and provides a framework to consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema, in which radio furnished the framework for the development of its industry and star system. Star-contract disputes from studio archives and evolving sound conventions in film texts are ventriloquial gambits that rearticulate the relationship between voice and body in a shifting organization of the senses. In Marshall’s film, the actress is the site of multiples selves that surface differentially in relation to the image. Marshall is never quite in synch, is never quite embodied, is never quite diegeticized. This failure to diegeticize mocks a Hollywood classicism that differentiated diegetic and non-diegetic sound in order to secure a narrative space distinct from the theatrical space.Less
The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies and provides a framework to consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema, in which radio furnished the framework for the development of its industry and star system. Star-contract disputes from studio archives and evolving sound conventions in film texts are ventriloquial gambits that rearticulate the relationship between voice and body in a shifting organization of the senses. In Marshall’s film, the actress is the site of multiples selves that surface differentially in relation to the image. Marshall is never quite in synch, is never quite embodied, is never quite diegeticized. This failure to diegeticize mocks a Hollywood classicism that differentiated diegetic and non-diegetic sound in order to secure a narrative space distinct from the theatrical space.
Rupert Cox, Andrew Irving, and Christopher Wright (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719085055
- eISBN:
- 9781526109958
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719085055.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and ...
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Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The book suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not based simply in text, writing or correspondence theories of truth. As such, Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual, sound and film studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural, and textual forms—for example text and image, image and sound, body and voice. What—we ask—is the relationship between the interiority of a person’s experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience ‘open’ to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? We argue that there is a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. The collected papers and audio-visual materials presented on a DVD, explore the potential for a more sensorially-grounded, critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research.Less
Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The book suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not based simply in text, writing or correspondence theories of truth. As such, Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual, sound and film studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural, and textual forms—for example text and image, image and sound, body and voice. What—we ask—is the relationship between the interiority of a person’s experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience ‘open’ to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? We argue that there is a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. The collected papers and audio-visual materials presented on a DVD, explore the potential for a more sensorially-grounded, critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research.
Timothy J. Cooley (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042362
- eISBN:
- 9780252051203
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042362.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
This critique of sustainability is intended to improve cultural sustainability advocacy in ecomusicology, sound studies, and music. The idea of sustainability is expanded in four ways: first, by ...
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This critique of sustainability is intended to improve cultural sustainability advocacy in ecomusicology, sound studies, and music. The idea of sustainability is expanded in four ways: first, by acknowledging the challenge of sustainability, getting past basic meanings of “endure,” and using sustainability more robustly in its meanings of “change”; second, by arguing for the foundational role of nature / environmental studies; third, by understanding sustainability as a lens rather than a goal, noun, or verb; and fourth, by arguing for aesthetics as an important addition to three-part sustainability theories. Through the lens of a change-oriented, environment-based sustainability, music and sound studies scholars can demonstrate how listeners and musicians value sounds and therefore cultural actions that exist in ethically charged contexts.Less
This critique of sustainability is intended to improve cultural sustainability advocacy in ecomusicology, sound studies, and music. The idea of sustainability is expanded in four ways: first, by acknowledging the challenge of sustainability, getting past basic meanings of “endure,” and using sustainability more robustly in its meanings of “change”; second, by arguing for the foundational role of nature / environmental studies; third, by understanding sustainability as a lens rather than a goal, noun, or verb; and fourth, by arguing for aesthetics as an important addition to three-part sustainability theories. Through the lens of a change-oriented, environment-based sustainability, music and sound studies scholars can demonstrate how listeners and musicians value sounds and therefore cultural actions that exist in ethically charged contexts.
James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226402079
- eISBN:
- 9780226402109
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226402109.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific ...
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What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific discovery were not mutually exclusive. The collection gathers work by leading scholars to reveal as-yet-undocumented associations between music and science. These two disciplines were conjoined in ways hitherto unrecognized, through vibrant popular practices that celebrated entanglements of seeing and hearing. Sound was implicated in the development of new forms of knowledge, furnishing understandings of light and its perception, even while vision informed scientific conceptions of music. The power of science, as much as the power of music, relied on performance, spectacle, experiment, and the virtuosic art of the "romantic" performer-genius. London is reimagined here: no longer the capital of das Land ohne Musik, it is rather the most important European center for the consolidation of the study of sound. The focus is a crucial sixty-year period, from Charles Burney’s ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe “from the earliest ages to the present period” (completed in 1789) to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. The accumulated contents of these framing repositories set the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, throwing light on an era before the "natural" division of aural and visual knowledge.Less
What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific discovery were not mutually exclusive. The collection gathers work by leading scholars to reveal as-yet-undocumented associations between music and science. These two disciplines were conjoined in ways hitherto unrecognized, through vibrant popular practices that celebrated entanglements of seeing and hearing. Sound was implicated in the development of new forms of knowledge, furnishing understandings of light and its perception, even while vision informed scientific conceptions of music. The power of science, as much as the power of music, relied on performance, spectacle, experiment, and the virtuosic art of the "romantic" performer-genius. London is reimagined here: no longer the capital of das Land ohne Musik, it is rather the most important European center for the consolidation of the study of sound. The focus is a crucial sixty-year period, from Charles Burney’s ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe “from the earliest ages to the present period” (completed in 1789) to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. The accumulated contents of these framing repositories set the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, throwing light on an era before the "natural" division of aural and visual knowledge.
T. Austin Graham
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199862115
- eISBN:
- 9780199332748
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862115.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter is an overview of three broad questions, each of which pertains to American musical authors their boundary-crossing, multidisciplinary works. What did music represent to the American ...
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This chapter is an overview of three broad questions, each of which pertains to American musical authors their boundary-crossing, multidisciplinary works. What did music represent to the American public and the literary establishment in the early twentieth century? What role does the sense of hearing play in the reading act? And what relative value does popular culture enjoy in comparison to the “high” arts?Less
This chapter is an overview of three broad questions, each of which pertains to American musical authors their boundary-crossing, multidisciplinary works. What did music represent to the American public and the literary establishment in the early twentieth century? What role does the sense of hearing play in the reading act? And what relative value does popular culture enjoy in comparison to the “high” arts?
Brian Kane
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- June 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199347841
- eISBN:
- 9780199347872
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199347841.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Philosophy of Music
Sound Unseen explores acousmatic sound—a sound that one hears without seeing its cause. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in his Traité des objets musicaux, first popularized the ...
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Sound Unseen explores acousmatic sound—a sound that one hears without seeing its cause. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in his Traité des objets musicaux, first popularized the term “acousmatic.” After an introduction, chapter 1 provides a thorough exegesis of Schaeffer’s theory of acousmatics. It also presents three objections to Schaeffer’s theories (myth, phantasmagoria, and ontology) around which the book is structured. In part I, the origins of the word acousmatic are traced from Pythagoras to 18th- century France, and then to the present. After showing the mythic use of the term throughout history, a rationale is given for a better way to uncover the history of acousmatic sound. In part II, a sketch of the history of acousmatic sound in music is presented, focusing on the use of unseen sounds in 19th- century music aesthetics and concert practice. A theory of acousmatic technê is presented. Then, through a reading of Kafka’s tale “The Burrow,” a theory of the ontology of acousmatic sound is presented that focuses on the roles of “spacing” (espacement) and underdetermination. In part III, the theory is applied in two case studies: first, on the guitarist and inventor Les Paul; and second, on the role of the acousmatic voice in 20th-century philosophy, starting with Husserl and Heidegger, and ending with Mladen Dolar,The book concludes with some final thoughts about acousmatic sound, music studies, and sound studies.Less
Sound Unseen explores acousmatic sound—a sound that one hears without seeing its cause. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in his Traité des objets musicaux, first popularized the term “acousmatic.” After an introduction, chapter 1 provides a thorough exegesis of Schaeffer’s theory of acousmatics. It also presents three objections to Schaeffer’s theories (myth, phantasmagoria, and ontology) around which the book is structured. In part I, the origins of the word acousmatic are traced from Pythagoras to 18th- century France, and then to the present. After showing the mythic use of the term throughout history, a rationale is given for a better way to uncover the history of acousmatic sound. In part II, a sketch of the history of acousmatic sound in music is presented, focusing on the use of unseen sounds in 19th- century music aesthetics and concert practice. A theory of acousmatic technê is presented. Then, through a reading of Kafka’s tale “The Burrow,” a theory of the ontology of acousmatic sound is presented that focuses on the roles of “spacing” (espacement) and underdetermination. In part III, the theory is applied in two case studies: first, on the guitarist and inventor Les Paul; and second, on the role of the acousmatic voice in 20th-century philosophy, starting with Husserl and Heidegger, and ending with Mladen Dolar,The book concludes with some final thoughts about acousmatic sound, music studies, and sound studies.
