- Sound culture
Sound culture is an
interdisciplinary field of studies which considers the "the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does this from a much broader perspective than standard disciplines" [Pinch, T. and Bijsterveld, K, 2004, "Sound Studies: new Technologies and Music", in "Social Studies of Science", 345, pp. 635-648]Sound Culture differs from traditional academic fields such as
sociology of music,ethnomusicology andhistory of music because it adopts a much broader perspective on music and sounds in the social world. EspeciallySound studies are interested in the connection between the development of the highly complex contemporary society and the ways people developed in order to manage and rearrange objects, discourses and practices involved in the listening acts.A strong role in developing the
Sound studies is played by the field ofScience and Technology Studies , (cfr.Social construction of technology ) inside which a clear definition of the field has been presented in the special issue of the academic journal "Social Studies of Science", nr. 345 (october 2004).Bibliography
The first seminal contributions in sound studies could be considered the books of
R. Murray Schafer "The Tuning of the World" (1977) and ofJacques Attali "Noise: The Political Economy of Music" (1985).Current important contributions also are
Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's "Analog Days" (2002); Jonathan Sterne's "Audible Past" (2003) and Emily Thompson's "The Soundscape of Modernity "(2002).References
Links
A syllabus from a graduate seminar on Sound Studies taught by Jonathan Sterne in the fall of 2006. http://sterneworks.org/soundsyllabus06.pdf
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