Sound studies

Sound Studies is an interdisciplinary field, which looks at the many different ways sound has differed throughout history, with an emphasis on keeping the scope broad. It can be broken up into six main parts, according to the work of Johnathan Stern. These are: Hearing, Listening, Deafness; Spaces, Sites, Scapes; Transduce and Record; Collectivities and Couplings; Aesthetics, Experiences, Interpretation; and Voices.

The basic research methods and approaches of sound studies is still being determined by those within it, generally split along the lines of a cultural anthropological approach (Veit Erlmann and Holger Schulze) and one that is more in line with traditional scientific technological studies (Advocated by the journal Social Studies of Science).

Sound scholars look at ways in which sound interacts with the world around it, and the ways in which humans interact with that sound. Some are interested in reaction and change and some focus more on enduring, ‘true’ sound.

Hearing and Listening

Two significant categories to what we hear and pay attention to are natural and technological sounds (Schafer 145). It has been found, however, that the proportion of nature sounds heard and noticed has decreased over the past two centuries for Europe, from 43% to 20%, but not for North America, where it has stayed around 50%. Additionally, the proportion of technological sounds has stayed around 35% for Europe, but decreased in North America. While technological increases have not been sonically noticed, the decrease in silence has been noticed, from 19% to 9%.

For the idea of listening, objects can be considered auditorily as compared to visually. The objects that are able to be experienced by sight and by sound can be thought of in a venn diagram, with mute and visible objects in the vision category, with aural and invisible objects in the sound category, and aural and visible objects in the overlapping category.Objects that do not fall into a specific category can be considered beyond the horizons of sound and sight. The common denominator for aural objects is movement.

Three modes of listening have been recognized; casual listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. Casual listening, the most common, consists of listening in order to gather ideas about its source. Sound in this case is informational and can be used to recognize voices, determine distance, or understand differences between humans and machines. Semantic listening is when a sound is not only heard but also processed. When a sound is given meaning and context, as seen in speech and fluent dialogue. Reduced listening focuses on the traits of the sound itself regardless of cause and meaning.

Spaces, Sites and Scapes

Sound is heard through space. But this defining of sound and space is further nuanced by their interdependent existence, creation, and dissolution. This idea of the acoustic environment and its social inextricability has become a source of interest within the field of sound studies. Critical to this contemporary discussion of the symbiotic social space and sonic space is R. Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape. Schafer uses the term soundscape to describe "a total appreciation of the sonic environment," and, through soundscape studies, attempts to more holistically understand "the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change," (Schaffer, 1994, p. 8, 1). In understanding the environment as events being heard, the soundscape is indicative of the social conditions and characteristics that create it. In industrialized cities, the soundscape is industrial noises, in a rainforest the soundscape is the sound of nature, and in an empty space the soundscape is silence. Moreover, the soundscape is argued to foretell future societal trends. The soundscape is not just representative of the environment which surrounds it but it makes up its very essence. The soundscape is the environment on a wavelength that is auditory rather than tactile or visible, but very much as real.

Schaffer’s concept of the soundscape has become a hallmark of sound studies and is referenced, built upon, and criticized by writers from a wide breadth of disciplines and perspectives. Common themes explored through the analysis of the soundscape are the conflict between nature and industry, the impact of technology on sound production and consumption, the issue of cultural sound values and the evolution of acoustics, and the power dynamics of silence and noise.

Transduce and Record

Our perception of a recorded sound’s authenticity has been greatly impacted by the commercial influence of capitalism. Even the dead now profit from recordings they’ve made, making music more timeless than ever before. Bringing the past into the present generates a sense of familiarity which compels the public to engage in new forms of listening.

In a Memorex commercial involving Ella Fitzgerald and Chuck Mangione, Fitzgerald is unable to discern the difference between a live performance and a recording of Mangione playing the trumpet. This presents a scene to viewers which sells cassette tapes as ideal objects of high-fidelity, auditory preservation. What was once an autonomic experience of memory which integrated visual and auditory stimuli (live music) has become a consumable item which popularizes and commodifies sonic memory explicitly.

Part of this shift in the dynamics of recorded sound has to do with a desire for noise reduction. This desire is representative of a mode of recording referred to by scholar James Lastra as "telephonic:" a mode in which sound is regarded as having hierarchically important qualities, with clarity and intelligibility being the most important aspects. This contrasts with phonographic recording, which generates a "point of audition" from which a sense of space can be derived, sacrificing quality for uniqueness and fidelity. This technique is often used in movies to demonstrate how a character hears something (such as muffled voices through a closed door). Through various forms of media, recorded music affects our perceptions and consumptive practices more often than we realize.

See also

• Audiophile

Further reading

• R. Murray Schafer (1977), The Tuning of the World, (considered as the first contribution in sound studies.)
• R. Murray Schafer (1994), The soundscape. In The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books. pp. 3–12
• Michael Doucet (1983), "Space, Sound, Culture, and Politics: Radio Broadcasting in Southern Ontario". Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadienVolume 27, Issue 2, pages 109–127, June 1983, [1]
• Jacques Attali (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music
• John Potts (1997), "Is There a Sound Culture?", Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, December 1997, vol. 3 no. 4, pp. 10–14
• Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (2002), Analog Days
• Thompson, Emily (2002), The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900-1930. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 1–12
• Jonathan Sterne (2003), The Audible Past
• Georgina Born (1995), Rationalizing Culture
• Georgina Born (ed.) (2013), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience
• Peter Szendy (2007), Listen, A History of Our Ears (the original French version, Ecoute, une histoire de nos oreilles, was published in 2001)
• Michele Hilmes (2005), "Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?", American Quarterly, Volume 57, Number 1, March 2005, pp. 249–259, [2]
• Holger Schulze & Christoph Wulf (2007), Klanganthropologie
• Holger Schulze (2008), Sound Studies
• special issue on "The Politics of Recorded Sound" by Social Text 102 (2010), edited by Gustavus Stadler.
• Veit Erlmann (2010), Reason and Resonance
• Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld (2011), Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies
• Florence Feiereisen & Alexandra Merley Hill (2011), Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century
• Kate Crawford (2009) "Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media". Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies Volume 23, Issue 4, pp. 525–535
• Shuhei Hosokawa (1984), "The Walkman Effect", Popular Music 4:165-80
• James Lastra (2000), "Fidelity Versus Intelligibility" pp. 138–43. New York: Columbia University Press
• Goodman, Steve (2010) "The Ontology of Vibrational Force" Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear Cambridge: MIT Press. pp 81-84
• Don Ihde (1974). The Auditory Dimension. In Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. Pp. 49-55
• Michael Bull (2008) Sound Moves : iPod Culture and Urban Experience. London: Routledge. pp 39–49.

External links

• European Sound Studies Association
• A syllabus from a graduate seminar on Sound Studies taught by Jonathan Sterne in the fall of 2006.
• Weird Vibrations, a sound studies blog.
• Sounding Out!, a sound studies blog
• Anthropology of Sound, a sound studies blog
• Master of Arts: Sound Studies, study Sound Studies at the University of Arts Berlin
• Sound Studies Lab, a research project on auditory culture at the Humboldt-University of Berlin