Sterne, J. (1997). Sounds like the Mall of America: Programmed music and the architectonics of commercial space. Ethnomusicology, 41(1), 22–50.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 21/04/2021, 09:48
Sterne, J. (2012). Sonic imaginations. In J. Sterne (Ed), The Sound Studies Reader. (pp. 1–17). London: Routledge.
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 13/05/2016, 14:30
"Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world."
"Sound studies' challenge is to think across sounds, to consider sonic phenomena in relationship to one another—as types of sonic phenomena rather than as things-in-themselves—whether they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings, performances, or another other [sic] path into sonic life."
Sound studies is an academic field in the humanities and social sciences defined by combination of object and approach. Not all scholarship about or with sound is "sound studies," just as not all scholarship about society is Sociology, not all scholarship with a concept of culture is cultural studies or Anthropology, not all scholarship that works with concepts of languages is Linguistics. The inside/outside description is useful for characterization, but is not useful in the first instance of the judgment of relevance or quality.
Sound students recognize sound as a problem that cuts across academic disciplines, methods and objects, though the field's institutional existence will vary as it moves across different national university cultures (and all disciplines begin begin as interdisciplines).
Sound studies work reflexively attends to its core concepts and objects.
Sound studies work is conscious of its own historicity. Sound students are aware that they are part of an ongoing conversation about sound that spans eras, traditions, places, and disciplines; they are also aware of the specific histories of inquiring about and writing about sound in their home disciplines.
Sound studies has an essential "critical" element, in the broadest sense of critique. It may also take on characteristics of a producer, policy, technical, political, artistic or training discourse. But without critique, it is art, technical discourse, science, cultural production or training practices "about sound," and not sound studies (though such work will often be of great interest to sound students).
Sterne uses the term 'sound students' to describe those who "produce and transform knowledge about sound and in the process reflexively attend to the (cultural, political, environmental, aesthetic. . .) stakes of that knowledge production".
"Does sound refer to a phenomenon out in the world which ears then pick up? Does it refer to a human phenomenon that only exists in relation to the physical world? Or is it something else? The answer to the question has tremendous implications for both the objects and methods of sound studies."
