Sound Studies

Sound studies examines concepts, practices, and technologies of sound and listening in different historical and cultural contexts. It is considered a relatively new field, emerging in the first few years of the 21st century. However, texts from the late 20th century—notably Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985) and R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World and Our Sonic Environment (1994)—have been central to the formation and development of sound studies. Common areas of study include sound technologies and media, philosophies of sound and listening, and soundscapes and sound environments. Sound-studies scholarship also addresses specific aspects of auditory culture, such as noise, silence, loudness, vocality, speech, sound art, and music, and their imbrication with ethical, political, and ecological relations. A central contestation of the field is the importance of sound and aurality to the historical developments associated with modernity. Sound studies have sought to challenge the ocularcentric tendencies of cultural and critical analysis, and the associated dualisms of hearing/seeing and sound/vision. Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary in its scope, research in sound studies works in and across history, musicology, sociology, cinema studies, literary studies, disability studies, American studies, geography, anthropology, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, architecture, gender studies, critical race studies, and art history. Consequently, the field’s analytic approaches and methods are diverse. However, it has often been Eurocentric, centering the West and the white, male innovator. There is a growing body of work that engages with the racial and gendered dimensions of sound and has sought to expand the remit of sound studies beyond the colonial core.