Sound and Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel by Karin Bijsterveld, etal. (review)

For quite some time sound studies have played an important role in the scholarly world. In 2012, Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld edited the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, and several recent conferences testify that this field is alive and well. As to the more specialized issue of audio technologies for mobile listening, there are recent publications by Michael Bull and Heike Weber as well as Technology and Culture’s special volume on “Shifting Gears” with articles on the automobile and aurality.

Sound and Safe (not a bad idea for a book title): A History of Listening behind the Wheel is a collaborative work by researchers at Maastricht University and Eindhoven University of Technology, who have been particularly active in investigating aspects of sound studies from the point of view of the social studies of science and technology, cultural history of technology, sensory history, and mobility studies. Some of the contributions have been published elsewhere, which could have made for a patchwork book. Thankfully, and not least due to the informative first and sixth chapters, in which the authors link their contributions and make an attempt at finding common theoretical ground, this problem is avoided.

Chapters 2 through 5 are variations on the theme of aurality and the automobile. They look at enclosing car bodies during the 1920s and 1940s and transforming the sporting automobiles into a middle-class fantasy; they investigate the listening driver’s encapsulation from the 1920s to the 1970s, which changed the sensorial balance in the car; they deal with “sonic streamlining” from the 1970s on with a rapidly growing number of noise barriers; and they tackle the issue of “selling sound”—sensory marketing in the automotive industry from the 1990s. The authors make clear that one of the reasons engineers fought noise in the 1920s was to create an impression of reliability. While during the first decades of the twentieth century monitoring and diagnostic listening were considered the driver’s duty, it later came to be regarded as the realm of mechanics and automotive engineers. From 1920 through the 1970s this was paralleled by a process of increasing car radio listening in which its meaning shifted gradually. Whereas the car radio was first regarded as a companion for lonely drivers, from the 1960s on it transformed into a sonic assistant, helping to cope with the noise on the road as a musical sedative in traffic jams. To this was added, from the 1970s, traffic information, which helped drivers escape traffic jams and turned the car radio into a “magic carpet.” These new forms of “acoustic cocooning” gave them a sense of control while moving in a corridor that controlled them.

This well-researched book is based on archival sources, interviews, historical automotive ads, and marketing material. There is also a useful essay on illustrations, summarizing the main findings and showing their relevance for the decades after the 1940s. In chapter 5 the authors provide a section which might be described as a “YouTube essay” on the commercialization of car sound, referring to period TV advertisements on automotive sound. Theoretically, the book is inter alia inspired by sociologist Gerhard Schulze’s concept of an “experience society” and “emotional capitalism” and by anthropologists Sarah Pink, David Howes, and Tim Ingold, who have advocated the study of the senses.

This is a major contribution to sound studies and to automotive history. But its aim is not only to focus on aural history but to integrate it into the history of the senses. The authors are largely successful linking aural history with visual and kinesthetic studies, but trying to do justice to all five senses remains a challenge. The volume focuses on Europe and the United States, which evokes the (not very original) reviewer’s comment that other parts of the world might be included later. The same goes for the issues of race, class, and...