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Sound studies has emerged as a major academic field in recent times. However, much of this material remains ahistorical or focused on technological advances of sound. This book departs from previous studies by drawing out connections between sound, memory and the senses, and how they emerge within a variety of historical contexts.
Earshot: Perspectives on Sound awakens an understanding of the decisive role that sound has played in history and culture. Although beginning with reference to antiquity, the primary focus is the changing status of sound and hearing in Western culture over the last six hundred years, covering the transition from the medieval period to the contemporary world. Since mythic times, sound has been an essential element in the formation of belief systems, personal and community identities and the negotiations between them. The varied case studies included in the book cover major reference points in the changing politics of sound, particularly in relation to the status of the other major conduit of social transactions, vision. Earshot is not a work of cultural theory but is anchored in social practices and material culture and is therefore a valuable resource for conveying sound to both undergraduate students as well as the general reader.
The first edition of The Auditory Culture Reader offered an introduction to both classical and recent work on auditory culture, laying the foundations for new academic research in sound studies. Today, interest and research on sound thrives across disciplines such as music, anthropology, geography, sociology and cultural studies as well as within the new interdisciplinary sphere of sound studies itself. This second edition reflects on the changes to the field since the first edition and offers a vast amount of new content, a user-friendly organization which highlights key themes and concepts, and a methodologies section which addresses practical questions for students setting out on auditory...
Relocating Popular Music uses the lens of colonialism and tourism to analyse types of music movements, such as transporting music from one place or historical period to another, hybridising it with a different style and furnishing it with new meaning. It discusses music in relation to music video, film, graphic arts, fashion and architecture.
Aural Diversity addresses a fundamental methodological challenge in music and soundscape research by considering the nature of hearing as a spectrum of diverse experiences. Bringing together an interdisciplinary array of contributors from the arts, humanities, and sciences, it challenges the idea of a normative listening experience and envisions how awareness of aural diversity can transform sonic arts, environments, and design and generate new creative listening practices. With contributors from a wide range of fields including sound studies, music, hearing sciences, disability studies, acoustics, media studies, and psychology, Aural Diversity introduces a new and much-needed paradigm that is relevant to scholars, students, and practitioners engaging with sound, music, and hearing across disciplines.
This Element focuses on how music is experienced, articulated, and reclaimed in urban commercial environments. Special attention is paid to listeners, spaces, and music, co- and re-produced continuously in their triangular relationship affected by social, legal, economic, and technological factors. The study of the historical development of background music industries, construction of contemporary sonic environments, and individual meaning-making is based on extensive data gathered through interviews, surveys, and fieldwork, and supported by archival research. Due to the Finnish context and the ethnomusicological approach, this study is culture-sensitive, providing a fresh 'factory-to-consumer' perspective on a phenomenon generally understood as industry-lead, behavioral, and global. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Popular music is as much about places as it is about sounds. Its production is forged in studios, rehearsal areas and bedrooms, places often mythologised in popular music history. Popular music is also recorded using studio techniques designed to recreate space, through reverb and other effects. Its collective consumption happens in concert halls, clubs and bars while its individual consumption takes place in streets, homes and at bus stops; all physical places. In addition, popular music often represents or sounds like certain urban or rural, real or imagined places of various scales. These places are often invisible, intangible and hidden behind the music, or recreated on record covers and...
On Listening is a unique collection of forty multi-disciplinary perspectives drawn from anthropology, bioacoustics, geography, literature, community activism, sociology, religion, philosophy, art history, conflict mediation and the sonic arts including music, ethnomusicology and field recording. These specially commissioned contributions explore the many ways in which skilled listening can mediate new relationships with our physical environment and the people and other species that we share it with. From the Introduction: Listening has become an increasingly popular subject of study. It features in conferences, in academic journals, in doctoral research projects. However, reflexive listening is an applied practice that exceeds the boundaries of academic institutions to take its place in a number of everyday settings. This book aims to connect the scholarly and the experiential and extend the contemporary discourse on listening.
The Nature of Nordic Music explores two distinctive yet complementary understandings of the term 'nature' the inherent features, characters and qualities of contemporary Nordic music, and how the elemental forces of nature, the phenomena of the physical world (landscape, climate, environment), inspire and condition creativity here. Within a broader debate about the meaning of 'Nordicness', 12 case studies challenge our assumptions about a 'Nordic tone' to reveal a creative energy that is diverse and cosmopolitan in outlook. Each of the three parts of the book - 'Identities', 'Images' and 'Environments' - accommodates an eclectic array of musical genres (classical, popular, jazz, folk, electronic). This book will appeal to anyone interested in Nordic music and culture, especially students and researchers.