Search Results

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The opening decades of the twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of modern sound media, with workers in US film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles tailored to emerging technologies of electric sound reproduction that directly shaped dominant forms and experiences of modern sound culture. Focusing on broadcasting’s initial expansion period during the 1920s, Making Radio explores the forms of creative labor pursued for the medium before the better-known network era of the 1930s and 1940s, assessing their role in shaping radio’s own identity and identifying affinities with parallel practices pursued for conversion-era film and phonography. Tracing programming forms adopted by early radio writers and programmers, production techniques developed by studio engineers, and performance styles cultivated by on-air talent, it shows how radio workers negotiated a series of broader industrial and cultural pressures to establish best practices for their medium. In the process, it argues, these sound workers shaped not only the future of broadcasting, but also contributed to much broader shifts in popular forms of music, drama, and public oratory, ushering in a new era of electric sound entertainment.