The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies

The oxford handbook of sound studies offers new and engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms. The book considers sounds and music as experienced in such diverse settings as shop floors, laboratories, clinics, design studios, homes, and clubs, across an impressively broad range of historical periods and national and cultural contexts. Science has traditionally been understood as a visual matter, a study which has historically been undertaken with optical instruments such as slides, graphs, and telescopes. This book questions that notion powerfully by illustrating how sounds have always been a part of human experience, shaping and transforming the world in which we live in ways that often go unnoticed. Sounds and music, the articles argue, are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, art, commerce, and politics in ways which impact our perception of the world. Through a diverse set of case studies, articles illustrate how sounds—from the sounds of industrialization, to the sounds of automobiles, to sounds in underwater music and hip-hop, to the sounds of nanotechnology—give rise to new forms listening practices. In addition, the book discusses the rise of new public problems such as noise pollution, hearing loss, and intellectual property and privacy issues that stem from the spread and appropriation of new sound and music-related technologies, analog and digital, in many domains of life.