Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound eds. by Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett (review)

At a casual glance a reader might be tempted to ask, "is there really a need for an entire book on stereo?" Stereo and multichannel sound is so pervasive in our lives today, and the technology is so easily available, one might feel comfortable taking it for granted. But what does one really know about how, when, and why stereo was developed? How did it become the norm for the average listener? In my work with stage production and media room designers, I found that even professionals configure stereo setups as two speakers placed on the left and right of a projection screen fed from a single mono sound source, unaware that stereo actually requires two discrete audio channel outputs. Such situations demonstrate that there is an ongoing need for both a surface and deeper understanding of stereo. A book addressing this issue is well timed, as the generation of people involved in the evolution of stereo is aging and many students and young professionals did not grow up during an era when stereo was rare and not an expectation (whether it be mono LPs in the early 1960s or even mono TVs that were standard well into the 1980s).

In spring 2012, the Sound Studies Group at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture organized a conference, "Living Stereo: History, Culture, Multichannel Sound," that challenged presenters to reflect on "the history and significance of stereo sound reproduction in aural culture." The call for the conference presentations noted that although "the whole culture and industry of music and sound became organized around the principle of stereo during the mid twentieth century … nothing about this—not the invention or acceptance or ubiquity of stereo—was inevitable. Nor did the aesthetic conventions, technological objects, and listening practices required to make sense of stereo emerge fully formed, out of the blue" (from http://www.iaspm.net/living-stereo-history-culture-multichannel-sound/ [accessed February 20, 2017]. The original link to the conference call at http://carleton.ca/icslac/livingstereo is no longer active). Casting a wide net, the organizers solicited contributions from researchers in disciplines ranging from popular music, musicology, ethnomusicology, sound and media studies, sociology, gender studies, film theory, to science and technology studies.

A key result of this symposium was publication of Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, which consists of a substantial introductory chapter and eleven essays written by fifteen authors with expertise in a variety of disciplines. Starting from the common but broad theme of the history and significance of multichannel sound reproduction, the individual essays cover a range of topics and address aspects of the research, technical development, history, and culture of multichannel sound playback. In "Introduction: Living Stereo," the editors note that "given the significance and even, perhaps, the centrality of stereophony in contemporary musical and acoustic culture, it is surprising that stereo's widespread aesthetic, social and economic implications have been largely ignored in music, sound, and media studies" (p. 1). After reading through the book and its extensive reference list as well as searching other web, WorldCat, and journal resources, it is clear to me this is the first book to pull together a significant collection of historical, cultural, and musical research on this topic. While each chapter overlaps with a variety of fields of study, what is common to all of the chapters is that they intersect, in one way or another, with the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. As described in the Grove Music Online entry by one of this book's editors, Kyle Devine, sound study "aims to understand precepts and practices of sound as part of an auditory ecology that consists of cultural, industrial, scientific, and technological relations...