Abstract
Auditory experience and automobility have come in many ways to seem synonymous. We get in our cars and turn on the radio or music player, and we pass hour-hungry journeys listening to favourite albums or broadcast drama. The main line of debate around this development is that it is deeply indicative of a long process of privatization, heightening an institutionalised sense of consumer individualism and separating people from each other as they speed along in their isolated bubbles of sound. In this book, the authors refer to such features as ‘acoustic cocooning’ and the achievement of auditory privacy in public spaces. Blurring of private/public distinctions, in sometimes paradoxical ways, extends back beyond sonic experiences in sound-insulated motor cars to the advent of the mechanical reproduction of sound itself, but linking the rise of portable listening devices to the decline of the public sphere is only one strand of argument in this book, and Bijsterveld, Cleophas, Krebs and Mom also make historical perspectives integral to their study, as for instance in the second chapter where they trace the shift from open-top sporting automobiles to enclosed middle-class family vehicles between the 1920s and 1940s. This shift turned around the move to curb noisiness and, within the family saloon, gradually improve interior sonic quality. Such perspectives are further developed in the third chapter, which deals with the period from the 1920s to 1970s. There the authors show how diagnostic listening to car engines gradually passed from drivers to auto mechanics and engineers (although of course never totally) and how this coincided with the rise of the car radio. Within this rise, there was also a shift from characterizing the radio as boon companion on long-distance rides to mood regulation in heavy traffic. The remaining two chapters focus on the introduction of sound regulation during the 1970s and the advent of sonic branding and sensory marketing during the 1990s. The book as a whole moves into a number of neglected areas, and is an admirable study of automotive listening in the West (mainly western Europe and the United States). It is well researched and draws on such fields as cultural history, science and technology studies, sensory studies and the history and sociology of transport and mobility. Sound and Safe is strongly recommended.