Editorial

It's our intention in each Volume of this journal to include a themed issue, and here in Volume 2 is our first, under the title 'The Future of Sound Studies'. At the outset we present a sequence of position papers, curated by Tony Grajeda and Jay Beck, that have their origins in the workshop of the same name they chaired at the 2007 Society of Cinema and Media Scholars conference in Chicago. As their introduction suggests, the 'Future' here will evolve not only through the creation of new models for studying sound in media but also through the combination of existing methodologies and theoretical tools in the re-evaluation of sound within its cultural contexts - perhaps through the emergent area of 'auditory culture studies', an analogue to the now-established discipline of 'visual cultures'. In their advocacy of transdisciplinary strategies this set of papers forms a valuable supplement to Beck and Grajeda's recently published anthology Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (University of Illinois Press, 2008), to be reviewed in the next issue of MSMI.

Jacob Smith's article, 'Tearing Speech to Pieces', provides a fascinating and developed example of this new area of scholarship in unraveling the cultural life of voice-processing and voice-synthesising technologies in the 1940s and 50s, in particular the device used to animate the voice of 'Sparky's Magic Piano', the Sonovox (as seen in its patent diagram on the front cover). And in keeping with our desire to publish translations of important articles previously unavailable in English we also include here a prescient and elegant piece by Antoine Hennion from 1997 on the possibilities for the musicalisation of the plastic arts afforded by digital manipulation - now visible (and audible) in the creativity of the amateur mash-ups posted on YouTube, for example.

In keeping with its theme the issue concludes with reviews of three recent and important sound studies volumes. As ever we welcome your reflections and comments on this issue and on the Journal as a whole.