The following text is an excerpt from the introduction of the book The Sounds of Spectators at Football. The excerpt indicates the general motivation for the book, namely a discrepancy between, on the one hand, a widely held belief that the sounds of spectators are important to the experience of football spectatorship and, on the … Read more
Listening-with Humans and Nonhumans Auditioning a field recording, and assembling its meaning, is a similar yet very different process to making a jigsaw. As a child, I tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the crutch of the image guide. It was a process that oscillated between hope and despair. Hope at the freedom to … Read more
When do the sounds and silences of any war really end? I recently came across a contemporary story of a World War One shell exploding in the Carpathian Mountains. A newly married British couple of Ukrainian heritage, Norbert and Lydia Makarchuk had camped out in the idyllic countryside to share a honeymoon evening with family … Read more
Thousands of college instructors, after doing their job for the last year primarily from home and via video, are back to teach in real classrooms and lecture halls this fall. Instead of seeing their students locked into separate Zoom tiles on screen, they finally face them head-on again, physically present. Little about this, however, feels … Read more
In November 2020, Amazon launched Care Hub: ‘a free remote care-giving solution from Alexa’. Owners of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker in the United States are now able to use their device to provide updates to a designated caregiver, or call a loved one if they need help. In an advert for the service, an older … Read more
When we look back to the early moments of the pandemic, many of us may recall eerie moments of silence as some of the crisis’s first sensible features. Not the sight of masks. Not the splashy colors of graphics in the news. Not the flashing skin of politicians trying to present possible dangers as a … Read more
Within recent years, the creation of electronic music has seen a resurgence of interest in ‘modular’ approaches to sound synthesis and composition. While now, canonical modular systems such as the Moog and Buchla are well known and bear the names of their inventors, the Eurorack format, invented by Dieter Doepfer in the 90s, is a … Read more
In this regular Q&A series, we interview authors and major figures in the field about their work, interests, and overall thoughts on sound studies. This week, we spoke to musician, music editor and writer, Alan Licht. What are you working on right now? Common Tones: Selected Interviews 1995-2020, a collection of my interviews with various … Read more
This blog post examines the thesis, often stated in sound studies (Goodman, Hartford, Porcello, Daughtry), that war transforms the ways in which humans engage with sound. Much of this recent work has focussed on the idea that, as Hartford puts it, war ‘challenged prior understandings of the relationship between “listening”, “noise”, and “music”.’[1] There is … Read more
It was the power of music that seeded my interest in sound studies. Music was a time, as a child, when there was maximum happiness in the family home. Often, it meant socializing with others, the drinks were flowing and there were smiles all round. And the dancing – the rhythmic movement of bodies, the … Read more