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
Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld: Introduction: New Keys to the World of Sound
SECTION I: REWORKING MACHINE SOUND: SHOP FLOOR & TEST SITES
1. Mark M. Smith: The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization
2.
Hans-Joachim Braun: Turning a Deaf Ear? Industrial Noise and Noise Control in Germany since the 1920s
3. Stefan Krebs: "Sobbing, whining, rumbling": Listening to Automobiles as Social Practice
4. Eefje Cleophas and Karin Bijsterveld: Selling Sound: Testing, Designing, and Marketing Sound in
the European Car Industry
SECTION II: STAGING SOUND FOR SCIENCE AND ART: THE FIELD
5. Joeri Bruyninckz: Sound Sterile: Making Scientific Field Recordings in Ornithology
6. Stefan Helmreich: Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science
7. Julia Kursell: A Grey
Box: The Phonograph in Laboratory Experiments and Field Work, 1900-1920
SECTION III. STAGING SOUND FOR SCIENCE AND ART: THE LAB
8. Myles W. Jackson: From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments: The Tuning Fork, Metronome, and Siren
9. Cyrus Moody: Conversions: Sound and
Sight, Military and Civilian
10. Alexandra Supper: The Search for the 'Killer Application': Drawing the Boundaries Around the Sonification of Scientific Data
SECTION IV: SPEAKING FOR THE BODY: THE CLINIC
11. Hillel Schwartz: Inner and Outer Sancta: Ear Plugs and Hospitals
12.
Tom Rice: Sounding Bodies: Medical Studies and the Acquisition of Stethoscopic Perspectives
13. Mara Mills: Do Signals Have Politics? Inscribing Abilities in Cochlear Implants
SECTION V: EDITING SOUND: THE DESIGN STUDIO
14. Mark Grimshaw: Sound and Player Immersion in Digital
Games
15. William Whittington: The Sonic Playpen: Sound Design and Technology in Pixar's Animated Shorts
16. Timothy Taylor: The Avant-garde in the Family Room: American Advertising and the Domestication of Electronic Music in the 1960s and 1970s
SECTION VI: CONSUMING SOUND AND MUSIC:
THE HOME AND BEYOND
17. Andreas Fickers: Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface
18. Trever Hagen with Tia DeNora: From Listening to Distribution: Non-official Music Practices in Hungary and Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s
19. Mark Katz: The Amateur in the
Age of Mechanical Music
20. Trevor Pinch and Katherine Athanasiades: Online Music Sites as Sonic Sociotechnical Communities: Identity, Reputation, and Technology at ACIDplanet.com
SECTION VII: MOVING SOUND AND MUSIC: DIGITAL STORAGE
21. Ray Fouche: Analog turns Digital: Hip-hop,
Technology, and the Maintenance of Racial Authenticity
22. Michael Bull: iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasures of Audiotopia
23. Jonathan Sterne and Mitchell Aki: The Recording that Never Wanted to be Heard, and Other Stories of Sonification
Index
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Trevor Pinch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, and author or co-author of several books including Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2002, with Frank Trocco) and The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology (1993,
1998, with Harry Collins). Karin Bijsterveld is Professor of Science, Technology and Modern Culture at Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008), and co-editor of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies,
Memory and Cultural Practices (2009, with José van Dijck).
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Victorian Soundscapes - John M. Picker
Ways of Listening - Eric F. Clarke
Analysing Musical Multimedia - Nicholas Cook
Special Sound - Louis Niebur
Sounds - Casey O'Callaghan
