The Sound Studies Reader blends recent work that self-consciously describes itself as 'sound studies' along with earlier and lesser-known scholarship on sound from across the humanities and social sciences. The Sound Studies Reader touches on key themes like noise and silence; architecture, acoustics and space; media and reproducibility; listening, voices and disability; culture, community, power and difference; and shifts in the form and meaning of sound across cultures, contexts and centuries. Writers reflect on crucial historical moments, difficult definitions, and competing accounts of the role of sound in culture and everyday life. Across the essays, readers will gain a sense of the range and history of key debates and discussions in sound studies.
The collection begins with an introduction to welcome novice readers to the field and acquaint them the main issues in sound studies. Individual section introductions give readers further background on the essays and an extensive up to date bibliography for further reading in sound studies make this an original and accessible guide to the field.
Contributors: Rick Altman, Jacques Attali, Roland Barthes, Jody Berland, Karin Bijsterveld, Barry Blesser, Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Adriana Cavarero, Michel Chion, Kate Crawford, Richard Cullen Rath, Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dolar, John Durham Peters, Kodwo Eshun, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Gitelman, Gerard Goggin, Steve Goodman, Stefan Helmreich, Michelle Hilmes, Charles Hirschkind, Shuhei Hosokawa, Don Ihde, Douglas Kahn, Friedrich Kittler, Brandon LaBelle, James Lastra, Richard Leppert, Michèle Martin, Louise Meintjes, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, R. Murray Schafer, Ana Marķa Ochoa Gautier, John Picker, Benjamin Piekut, Trevor Pinch, Tara Rodgers, Linda-Ruth Salter, Jacob Smith, Jason Stanyek, Jonathan Sterne, Emily Thompson, Frank Trocco, Michael Veal, Alexander Weheliye
1. Sonic Imaginations Part 1: Hearing, Listening, Deafness 2. The Auditory Dimension 3. Noise: The Political Economy of Music 4. Contradicting Media: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening 5. The Three Listening Modes 6. Cassette Sermons, Aural Modernities and the Islamic Revival in Cairo 7. The Ontology of Vibrational Force 8. Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization 9. Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media Part 2: Spaces, Sites, -Scapes 10. The Soundscape 11. The Walkman Effect 12. Sound, Modernity and History 13. No Corner for the Devil to Hide 14. The Soundproof Study 15. Listening to Machines: Industrial Noise, Hearing Loss and the Cultural Meaning of Sound 16. Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs and Transductive Ethnography 17. Auditory Awareness as an Extension of Religion 18. The Audio-Visual iPod Part 3: Transduce and Record 19. The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility 20. Four and a Half Film Fallacies 21. Gramophone 22. Fidelity Versus Intelligibility 23. Shaping the Synthesizer 24. The Recording Studio as Fetish 25. New Media Publics 26. Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane Part 4: Collectivities and Couplings 27. This is the Voice of Algeria 28. The Culture of the Telephone 29. Radiating Culture 30. Reach Out Someone: the Telephonic Uncanny 31. Cellular Disability: Consumption, Design and Access 32. Social Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America Part 5: The Sonic Arts: Aesthetics, Experience, Interpretation 33. Desire, Power and the Sonorous Landscape 34. Science, Technology and the Avant-Garde 35. Noises of the Avant-Garde 36. Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality 37. Starship Africa 38. Auditory Relations 39. Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music Part 6: Voices 40. The Voice the Keeps Silence 41. The Grain of the Voice 42. "Feenin": Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music 43. Multiple Voices 44. The Frenzy of the Audible: Pleasure, Authenticity and Recorded Laughter 45. The Linguistics of the Voice
