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Sounding the field: recent works in sound studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2015

Tim Boon
Tim Boon*
Affiliation:
The Science Museum, London
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Extract

For sound studies, the publication of a 593-page handbook, not to mention the establishment of at least one society – the European Sound Studies Association – might seem to signify the emergence of a new academic discipline. Certainly, the books under consideration here, alongside many others, testify to an intensification of concern with the aural dimensions of culture. Some of this work comes from HPS and STS, some from musicology and cultural studies. But all of it should concern members of our disciplines, as it represents a long-overdue foregrounding of the aural in how we think about the intersections of science, technology and culture.

Type
Essay Review
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 493 - 502
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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References

1 David Hendy, Life on Air: A History of Radio Four, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

2 John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

3 He cites Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

4 Hans-Joachim Braun is editor of the collection Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Michael Bull is author of Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, London: Routledge, 2007. Jonathan Sterne is author of two seminal texts in the field: The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; and MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

5 Pinch, Trevor and Bijsterveld, Karin, ‘Sound studies: new technologies and music’, Social Studies of Science (2004) 34(5), pp. 635–648CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 636.

6 Pinch and Bijsterveld, op. cit. (5), 641–642; Perlman, Marc, ‘Golden ears and meter readers: the contest for epistemic authority in audiophilia’, Social Studies of Science (2004) 34(5), pp. 783–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

8 Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

9 Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond, New York: Zone Books, 2011.

10 Schwartz, op. cit. (9), dust jacket biographical note.

11 Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technologies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003; Roger Silverstone and E. Hirsch, Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 1992.

12 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Oakland: University of California Press, 2010; Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

13 Alexandra Hui, Julia Kursell and Myles Jackson (eds.), Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750 to 1980, Osiris (2013) 28.

14 See, for example, Rick Altman (ed.), Cinema/Sound, Yale French Studies (1980) 60; Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory Sound Practice, AFI Film Readers, London: Routledge, 1992; Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (eds.), Film Sound: Theory and Practice, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. For a more recent example see Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina (eds.), Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.