Book excerpt: 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 explorations.
A particular strength of the volume is the manner in which it locates listening practices by reference to the political and historical currents that have proved influential in their development. Listening is a dynamic practice in a constant state of flux, shaped by wider developments in the social landscape. Indeed, a vast wealth of soundscapes has fallen away into silence. Yet these articles present various strategies for harking back.
Works of fiction, diary extracts, archaeological findings, linguistic data, scripts and stage directions are all collected for the acoustic clues they might yield. Considering social life to be shaped by the simultaneous selective hearing and acoustic vision of the politically powerful, he opens up the concept of strategic deafness, a possibility which tends to be overlooked by the assump- tion that the ears are constantly open, undiscriminatingly receptive and, as a consequence, vulnerable.
It is easy to see that the manner in which perception is conceptualized denotes a certain way of imagining the human subject. Schafer describes an actively sensing subjectivity. As part of that sensory engagement, he or she is not only actively listening, but actively engaged in tuning out the ears to specific sounds and voices. Contrary to Schafer, Fran Tonkiss envisages listening as an involuntary accumulation and absorption of sound. But music also has the capacity to permeate cultural boundaries, engaging those whose ears are respectfully tuned to the voices of others.
It is precisely these respectfully tuned ears that Stephen Feld argues are required of the anthropologist. Feld, then, visualizes a colonialist and imperialist discourse with its ears tuned to its own hegemonic concerns.
An auditory anthropology constitutes an import- ant gesture towards recognizing alternative acoustic realities. Peek draws on the observations of numerous ethnologists to illustrate how, through their auditory arts, African peoples acoustically manifest and validate their spirit world. Vic Seidler reflects on the poignant sounds and silences he heard through his childhood, filtered through the biography of his mother, who fled Vienna as it came under Nazi control. He holds that the multi-sensory dimensions of social life are suppressed or transformed in the making of texts Ethnographies are static documents, entirely disengaged from the dynamics of lived reality and hopelessly inadequate as a means of communicating auditory phenomena.
Paradoxically, then, the anthropological vision masks a blindness, an inabil- ity within its own systems of representation to evoke the multi-sensory nature of experience. From this perspective, an emergent auditory anthro- pology might be construed as a sadly ironic academic endeavour.
In its attempt to discuss and describe ideology surrounding a realm of vivified and animate sound, researchers merely produce a flat, lifeless surface. Clearly an auditory ethnography would engage as complex a set of representa- tional issues as written ethnographies have done.
But while Howes adopts a very pessimistic and dismissive view of the a-sensory nature of the text, Paul Stoller is more optimistic. He holds that stylistic changes in the writing of ethnographies will ensure that intellectual possibilities for the exploration of the multi-sensory world remain open.
I do not ascribe to the notion that changes in literary style might shake loose the bonds of a supposedly repressive visualism within ethnographic writing. Instead, I would gesture towards a widening and deepening of the conceptual structures available to ethnography in its engagement with sensory experience, directing attention toward the value of auditory idioms. Indeed, I feel that it is in its project to generate diverse ways of listening to culture that The Auditory Culture Reader makes its most important contribution to the anthropology of the senses.
References Berendt, J. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence.
This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human rights.
What happens when stories meet mobile media? In this cutting-edge collection, contributors explore digital storytelling in ways that look beyond the desktop to consider how stories can be told through mobile, locative, and pervasive technologies. This book offers dynamic insights about the new nature of narrative in the age of mobile media, studying digital stories that are site-specific, context-aware, and involve the reader in fascinating ways.
Addressing important topics for scholars, students, and designers alike, this collection investigates the crucial questions for this emerging area of storytelling and electronic literature. Topics covered include the histories of site-specific narratives, issues in design and practice, space and mapping, mobile games, narrative interfaces, and the interplay between memory, history, and community.
Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction. Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica.
His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell. This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory.
Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.
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