Abstract
Sound, in all its diversity of configuration, scope and texture, is coming much more to the fore as an object of study. This is, and not before time, helping to offset the visualist hegemony that has long characterized media studies. Image-making media have obviously been hugely important, from photography through cinematography and television to video games, online media and mobile technologies. In attending to such media, though, the incidence and experience of soundtracks and soundscapes have been comparatively neglected, and it is only over the last 10–15 years or so that a concerted effort to overcome that neglect has been mounted. The result is the still-emergent field of sound studies, to which this valuable collection, edited by Jonathan Sterne, is directed.
Sterne divides his wide-ranging material into six sections, to each of which he adds a short and helpful preface outlining the issues and debates they cover. The first section attends to hearing and listening. The concern here is with the possibilities and the limits of audition, along with the structures of power that permeate them, as for instance in the silencing of the singing voices of industrial workers in the late 19th century and the gradual, piecemeal reintroduction of music in the workplace during the first half of the 20th century, through phonography and the wireless. This section is followed by one entitled ‘Spaces, Sites, Scapes’ where the focus is on the overall environments in which sound is heard and sonic cultures happen. Social space is always acoustically experienced, an aspect of reality wonderfully explored by Alain Corbin in his reading of the politics of the French countryside through village bells. This experience, which is of course continually changing, is now conceptually indissociable from R Murray Schafer’s fecund notion of the soundscape, and it is fitting that the section begins with an excerpt from his book on the acoustic environment.
The third section takes us into an issue that is of critical importance for media studies. This is the issue of transduction, the reconfiguration of sound in some other medium or format that subsequently results in the reproduction of that sound, which, as Walter Benjamin was one of the first to note, can then occur in situations beyond the reach of the original sound, as for instance when we listen to highlife in Hampstead or Haight Ashbury. Another dimension of modern media is explored in the fourth section: that of being an auditor and thence of being an audience. What is the collectivity associated with broadcast media, what sense of identity does it foster, and how is it possible to be a member of such a collectivity and yet develop a sense of intimacy at a distance with a broadcast personality? These have been crucial questions for media theory, and not only with regard to radio and recording. The question of communication across distances which transcends the limitations of physical space is also raised by telephony, covered by two contributions in this section. We then move into the penultimate section, the broad topic of which is art and aesthetics, with this cutting across the old and eroded boundaries of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Finally, we come to voice, and the sound we make when we produce an utterance of one kind or another. Voice is of course the very medium of self-expression, and central to the sense and meaning we make out of what other people say (or don’t say). It is an appropriate topic on which to finish the volume.
This is a rich collection of essays and extracts, as enjoyable as it is edifying. It brings together a huge array of work on sound and sonic worlds. There are contributions that are bound to be readily anticipated, but also real surprises and welcome reprises for items of scholarship which are not so well known. The book as a whole represents a milestone on the road to establishing sound studies as a robust area of enquiry and investigation.