One Future of Sound Studies Fits into the Palm of your Hand

The proliferation of PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones with various added features has already changed our experience of the world, media, mediation, and sound. A mediated version of the world now fits into the palms of our hands. These devices are also potentially the site of crucial questions explored by sound studies and critical theory more generally, questions that overlap and intertwine, impinging upon each other and constituting a conceptual framework that is to my mind both the past and the future of sound studies.

As always, the critical theorising of academia can help us to understand the daily lived experience of an increasingly mediated world. It can provide new perspectives and cause us to reflect upon that which might otherwise be taken for granted. We often devote our intellectual labour to what our neighbours and even our students merely encounter unreflectively. What might at first seem trivial – for example the sound a handheld device makes when summoning its owner, a.k.a. a ringtone – is in fact an increasingly crucial site of people's self-performance of identity and their experience of media.

The world of commerce takes notice even if our neighbours and our students do not. Billboard has for some years kept a chart of the week's most downloaded ringtones and a 2006 account describes ringtones as a $600-million industry (Franus 2006). Entertainment companies know a 'revenue stream' when they hear one, and marketers can readily identify another site in which to cultivate that longed-for 'partnership' between consumers and brands.

Simple reflection on our increasingly ubiquitous handheld devices draws to mind a series of subjects about which we pose the questions that are in my estimation the basis of sound studies. In this brief space I want to invoke some of the subjects that both drive my current research/writing projects and characterise the past and indeed the future of sound studies.

Technology

Sound studies has, for many of us, hinged on the subject of technology: its history, and its perpetually changing present. Often we cite work on the social construction of technology (SCOT) for the way it reminds us that any technological apparatus is always historically contingent (Pinch and Bijker 1987). Technology is understood not only as a physical object but also as the practices it enables and disables – as well as the discursive construction of both objects and practices.

Unlike the portable Victrola of the 1920s, the transistor radio, or even the first generation of mobile phones, these new portable devices are not linked to a specific medium. Instead they embody a convergence of media, and a convergence of socially produced categories. They offer both reciprocal voice and data communication, transmitted and recorded sound, still and moving images. They function simultaneously as camera/microphone, storage device, and monitor/speaker. They have the qualities of a 'sealed' black box/pre-programmed device, yet they are also consumer-programmable (within limits). They instantiate both the live and the recorded. They inhabit the realm not of 'either/or' but instead of 'not only but also'.

Hailing

Sounds, of course, hail us; they call out to us. Hailing can be coercive, seeking to induce in us a particular behaviour, whether instructing us to 'stand clear' of closing subway doors or beckoning us into a retail environment in which the physical design of aisles and displays, further acoustic inducements, and ubiquitous video monitors, will (seek to) pull us ever further into the store.

Such hailing can seem individuated – directed toward one quality of ourselves, or to our self-construction of identity. Or we can be hailed as a larger group. The voice on the Metro platform in Washington, D.C. addresses me as a security-conscious subway rider in a post-9/11 world. The voice instructs me how to behave if I see someone leave a package behind, speaking to me in the singular, 'If you see …'. But that voice also coercively reminds me that safety is now the responsibility of us all, hailing me as part of a security-conscious collective. Again, not 'either/or...