Abstract
Sound leaks into everything and is the precondition for silence, which is only a temporary negation of sound. Because it is ubiquitous, we have many words in the language to refer to it in one or other of its manifestations, so it is useful to have to hand this lexicon of its key conceptual terms in both scholarship and everyday parlance. These terms of course bring a semantic history in the trail of their uses over the course of time, and every entry looks into their etymology and range of meaning as well as examining what is entailed in their general frame of reference and application. It is perhaps inevitable that readers will value some entries more than others, and query the absence of terms not included. Cognition might be cited as one of these, or if that is deemed too broad a set of human abilities and processes, then memory could be highlighted, for sound (and especially music) is a major trigger of involuntary remembering as well as being a prized vehicle of actively concerted recollection. In addition to exploring these processes interlinking past and present, an entry under memory could also have asked what is remembered when we remember sound, and what distinguishes the memory of sound from memories evoked by sound reproduced in high fidelity recordings. The editors do explain why some items are missing, with ‘sound’ itself being too expansive in scope, an ‘über-keyword’ at the centre of its semiotic web and ‘media’ being enfolded in other terms or addressed from other explanatory perspectives. This is an important contribution to the emergent field of sound studies. It will help in both defining the field more fully and in refining its key terms more elaborately.