Written by the world's leading scholars and researchers in the emerging field of sound studies, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies offers new and fully engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms. The book considers sounds and music as experienced in such diverse settings as shop floors, laboratories, clinics, design studios, homes, and clubs, across an impressively broad range of historical periods and national and cultural contexts.
Science has traditionally been understood as a visual matter, a study which has historically been undertaken with optical technologies such as slides, graphs, and telescopes. This book questions that notion powerfully by showing how listening has contributed to scientific practice. Sounds have always been a part of human experience, shaping and transforming the world in which we live in ways that often go unnoticed. Sounds and music, the authors argue, are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, art, commerce, and politics in ways which impact our perception of the world. Through an extraordinarily diverse set of case studies, authors illustrate how sounds -- from the sounds of industrialization, to the sounds of automobiles, to sounds in underwater music and hip-hop, to the sounds of nanotechnology -- give rise to new forms listening practices. In addition, the book discusses the rise of new public problems such as noise pollution, hearing loss, and the "end" of the amateur musician that stem from the spread and appropriation of new sound- and music-related technologies, analog and digital, in many domains of life.
Rich in vivid and detailed examples and compelling case studies, and featuring a companion website of listening samples, this remarkable volume boldly challenges readers to rethink the way they hear and understand the world.
Contributors ; List of Figures ; Introduction: New Keys to the World of Sound - Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld ; SECTION I: REWORKING MACHINE SOUND: SHOP FLOOR & TEST SITES ; 1. The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization - Mark M. Smith ; 2. Turning a Deaf Ear? Industrial Noise and Noise Control in Germany since the 1920s - Hans-Joachim Braun ; 3. "Sobbing, whining, rumbling": Listening to Automobiles as Social Practice - Stefan Krebs ; 4. Selling Sound: Testing, Designing, and Marketing Sound in the European Car Industry - Eefje Cleophas and Karin Bijsterveld ; SECTION II: STAGING SOUND FOR SCIENCE AND ART: THE FIELD ; 5. Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology - Joeri Bruyninckx ; 6. Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science - Stefan Helmreich ; 7. A Grey Box: The Phonograph in Laboratory Experiments and Field Work, 1900-1920 - Julia Kursell ; SECTION III. STAGING SOUND FOR SCIENCE AND ART: THE LAB ; 8. From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments: The Tuning Fork, Metronome, and Siren - Myles W. Jackson ; 9. Conversions: Sound and Sight, Military and Civilian - Cyrus Mody ; 10. The Search for the 'Killer Application': Drawing the Boundaries Around the Sonification of Scientific Data - Alexandra Supper ; SECTION IV: SPEAKING FOR THE BODY: THE CLINIC ; 11. Inner and Outer Sancta: Ear Plugs and Hospitals - Hillel Schwartz ; 12. Sounding Bodies: Medical Studies and the Acquisition of Stethoscopic Perspectives - Tom Rice ; 13. Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants - Mara Mills ; SECTION V: EDITING SOUND: THE DESIGN STUDIO ; 14. Sound and Player Immersion in Digital Games - Mark Grimshaw ; 15. The Sonic Playpen: Sound Design and Technology in Pixar's Animated Shorts - William Whittington ; 16. The Avant-garde in the Family Room: American Advertising and the Domestication of Electronic Music in the 1960s and 1970s - Timothy Taylor ; SECTION VI: CONSUMING SOUND AND MUSIC: THE HOME AND BEYOND ; 17. Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface - Andreas Fickers ; 18. From Listening to Distribution: Non-official Music Practices in Hungary and Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s - Trever Hagen with Tia DeNora ; 19.The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music - Mark Katz ; 20. Online Music Sites as Sonic Sociotechnical Communities: Identity, Reputation, and Technology at ACIDplanet.com - Trevor Pinch and Katherine Athanasiades ; SECTION VII: MOVING SOUND AND MUSIC: DIGITAL STORAGE ; 21. Analog turns Digital: Hip-hop, Technology, and the Maintenance of Racial Authenticity - Ray Fouche ; 22. iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasures of Audiotopia - Michael Bull ; 23. The Recording that Never Wanted to be Heard, and Other Stories of Sonification - Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Akiyama ; Index
