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Reviewed by:
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies ed. by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld
  • Andre Millard (bio)
The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+593. $150.

The emerging field of sound studies covers an impossibly broad range of research in the natural, health, and social sciences. Sound enters our lives in many different ways and engages our senses in many complex interactions. Sound studies is an energetic interdisciplinary field that intersects with media studies, anthropology, acoustics, cultural geography, and many other scholarly pursuits too numerous to list. Sound is studied by automobile engineers and ornithologists. Physicians listen to vital signs while architects ponder soundscapes. Sound is studied by ethnomusicologists, literary critics, environmentalists, and game designers. Finally, historians of technology try to make sense of it all. Happily, the editors of this impressive volume are both deeply engaged in science and technology studies, and Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld have worked hard to bring the potential of sound studies to our attention. The time is ripe for a collection like this: as the editors point out, calling sound studies an "emerging" field might be too modest given the amount of research and publication in the last few years (p. 7).

Imposing order and finding meaning in this vast scholarly domain is not easy. Pinch and Bijsterveld do an excellent job of summarizing the current state of research in all its diversity and complexity. The title the editors give to their introduction, "New Keys to the World of Sound," perfectly sums up the approach and value of this book. Yet their clear and concise introduction of thirty-five pages almost sinks under the weight of its bibliographic references. Twenty-seven contributors and 560 pages can do no more than scratch the surface of this field.

The editors have wisely chosen to organize these twenty-three papers around the different places where we experience sound. Thus the volume is divided into seven sections: the shop floor, field, laboratory, clinic, design [End Page 393] studio, home, and mobile sound. Only the last section fails to work, but it does present Michael Bull's stimulating research on how personal stereos and mobile phones have changed the ways we listen. Some of the sections come together well. The "shop floor" brings together studies of the sound-scapes of early American industrialization, the efforts of German governments to deal with industrial noise, engineers' and car owners' diagnosing strategies from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the research of European car manufacturers into the use of sound in automobile design and marketing. Other sections do not hold together so well, though the individual pieces can be strong. Thus in the "field" section a paper on underwater music is sandwiched between a study of the ways that ornithologists categorize and measure bird song and a history of the uses of the phonograph in laboratory experiments from 1900 to 1920.

"Handbook" implies a reference work, something that takes the reader across the whole field from beginning to end. I wonder if "sampler" might be a more appropriate title; this volume is not a whole meal but a smorgasbord of morsels—some tasty, others bland but nourishing, and a few indigestible. The editors have focused on science, technology, and medicine in assembling this collection, but there is something for everyone here: Rayvon Fouché talks about the maintenance of racial authenticity in hip-hop, Timothy Taylor shows how electronic music crept into television advertising in the 1960s, and Mark Katz answers John Philip Sousa's concerns about the deleterious effect of sound recording on amateur musicians.

The editors point out that modern science is primarily a visual affair and that a book is an overwhelming visual medium. Thus it follows that a handbook of sound studies must have a sonic presence. Oxford University Press hosts a website, www.oup.com/us/ohss, that presents supporting sound samples, but for less than half the chapters!My IT consultants are far from happy with this site and found it very difficult to navigate and access: many links go nowhere (posts to YouTube are not permanent), some contain words, not...

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