The Auditory Culture Reader


Book Description

The first edition of The Auditory Culture Reader offered an introduction to both classical and recent work on auditory culture, laying the foundations for new academic research in sound studies. Today, interest and research on sound thrives across disciplines such as music, anthropology, geography, sociology and cultural studies as well as within the new interdisciplinary sphere of sound studies itself. This second edition reflects on the changes to the field since the first edition and offers a vast amount of new content, a user-friendly organization which highlights key themes and concepts, and a methodologies section which addresses practical questions for students setting out on auditory explorations. All essays are accessible to non-experts and encompass scholarship from leading figures in the field, discussing issues relating to sound and listening from the broadest set of interdisciplinary perspectives. Inspiring students and researchers attentive to sound in their work, newly-commissioned and classical excerpts bring urban research and ethnography alive with sensory case studies that open up a world beyond the visual. This book is core reading for all courses that cover the role of sound in culture, within sound studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, media studies and urban geography.




Hearing History


Book Description

Hearing History is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory culture, or aural history. Gathering twenty-one of the fields most important writings, this volume will deepen and broaden our understanding of changing perceptions of sound and hearing and the ongoing education of our senses. The essays stimulate thinking on key questions: What is aural history? Why has vision tended to triumph over hearing in historical accounts? How might we begin to reclaim the sounds of the past? With theoretical and practical essays on the history of sound and hearing in Europe and the United States, the book draws on historical approaches ranging from empiricism to postmodernism. Some essays show the historian of technology at work, others highlight how With theoretical and practical essays on the history of sound and hearing in Europe and the United States, the book draws on historical approaches ranging from empiricism to postmodernism. Some essays show the historian of technology at work, others highlight how military, social, intellectual, and cultural historians have tackled historical acoustemologies. Investigating soundscapes that include a Puritan meetinghouse in colonial New England, the belfries of a French village at the close of the Old Regime, the court hall of Elizabeth I, and a Civil War battlefield, the essays vary just as widely in their topics, which include noise as a marker of social and cultural differences, the privileging of music as the sound of art, the persistence of Aristotelian ideas of sound into the seventeenth century, developments in sound related to medical practice, the advent of sound-recording technology, and noise pollution.




Sound Moves


Book Description

This innovative study opens up a new area in sociological and urban studies: the aural experience of the social, mediated through mobile technologies of communication. Whilst we live in a world dominated by visual epistemologies of urban experience, Michael Bull argues that it is not surprising that the Apple iPod, a sound based technology, is the first consumer cultural icon of the twenty-first century. This book, in using the example of the Apple iPod, investigates the way in which we use sound to construct key areas of our daily lives. The author argues that the Apple iPod acts as an urban Sherpa for many of its users and in doing so joins the mobile army of technologies that many of us habitually use to accompany our daily lives. Through our use of such mobile and largely sound based devices, the book demonstrates how and why the spaces of the city are being transformed right in front of our ears.




The Audible Past


Book Description

Table of contents




Deaf Culture


Book Description

A contemporary and vibrant Deaf culture is found within Deaf communities, including Deaf Persons of Color and those who are DeafDisabled and DeafBlind. Taking a more people-centered view, the second edition of Deaf Culture: Exploring Deaf Communities in the United States critically examines how Deaf culture fits into education, psychology, cultural studies, technology, and the arts. With the acknowledgment of signed languages all over the world as bona fide languages, the perception of Deaf people has evolved into the recognition and acceptance of a vibrant Deaf culture centered around the use of signed languages and the communities of Deaf peoples. Written by Deaf and hearing authors with extensive teaching experience and immersion in Deaf cultures and signed languages, Deaf Culture fills a niche as an introductory textbook that is more inclusive, accessible, and straightforward for those beginning their studies of the Deaf-World. New to the Second Edition: *A new co-author, Topher González Ávila, MA *Two new chapters! Chapter 7 “Deaf Communities Within the Deaf Community” highlights the complex variations within this community Chapter 10 “Deaf People and the Legal System: Education, Employment, and Criminal Justice” underscores linguistic and access rights *The remaining chapters have been significantly updated to reflect current trends and new information, such as: Advances in technology created by Deaf people that influence and enhance their lives within various national and international societies Greater emphasis on different perspectives within Deaf culture Information about legal issues and recent political action by Deaf people New information on how Deaf people are making breakthroughs in the entertainment industry Addition of new vignettes, examples, pictures, and perspectives to enhance content interest for readers and facilitate instructor teaching Introduction of theories explained in a practical and reader-friendly manner to ensure understanding An updated introduction to potential opportunities for professional and informal involvement in ASL/Deaf culture with children, youth, and adults Key Features: *Strong focus on including different communities within Deaf cultures *Thought-provoking questions, illustrative vignettes, and examples *Theories introduced and explained in a practical and reader-friendly manner




Sound and Noise


Book Description

This book is about how you listen and what you hear, about how to have a dialogue with the sounds around you. Marcia Jenneth Epstein gives readers the impetus and the tools to understand the sounds and noise that define their daily lives in this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study of how auditory stimuli impact both individuals and communities. Epstein employs scientific and sociological perspectives to examine noise in multiple contexts: as a threat to health and peace of mind, as a motivator for social cohesion, as a potent form of communication and expression of power. She draws on a massive base of specialist literature from fields as diverse as nursing and neuroscience, sociology and sound studies, acoustic ecology and urban planning, engineering, anthropology, and musicology, among others, synthesizing and explaining these findings to evaluate the ubiquitous effects of sound in everyday life. Epstein investigates speech and music as well as noise and explores their physical and cultural dimensions. Ultimately she argues for an engaged public dialogue on sound, built on a shared foundation of critical listening, and provides the understanding for all of us to speak and be heard in such a discussion. Sound and Noise is a timely evaluation of the noise that surrounds us, how we hear it, and what we can do about it.




The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies


Book Description

Written by the world's leading scholars and researchers in sound studies, this handbook offers new and engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms.




Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies


Book Description

This is the first scholarly work to examine the cultural significance of the "talking book" since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the earliest machine to enable the reproduction of the human voice. Recent advances in sound technology make this an opportune moment to reflect on the evolution of our reading practices since this remarkable invention. Some questions addressed by the collection include: How does auditory literature adapt printed texts? What skills in close listening are necessary for its reception? What are the social consequences of new listening technologies? In sum, the essays gathered together by this collection explore the extent to which the audiobook enables us not just to hear literature but to hear it in new ways. Bringing together a set of reflections on the enrichments and impoverishments of the reading experience brought about by developments in sound technology, this collection spans the earliest adaptations of printed texts into sound by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and other novelists from the late nineteenth century to recordings by contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison and Barack Obama at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the voices gathered here suggest, it is time to give a hearing to one of the most talked about new media of the past century.




The Soundscape of Modernity


Book Description

A vibrant history of acoustical technology and aural culture in early-twentieth-century America. In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston's Symphony Hall, New York's office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.




Sound Unseen


Book Description

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.