Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life

Description

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sounding and listening, and discusses how sound studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture, street life and sonic technologies, Acoustic Territories opens up a range of critical perspectives--it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by engaging auditory experience as found within particular cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces sound culture through a topographic structure: from underground territories to the home, and further, into the rhythms and vibrations of streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself as an arena of transmitted imaginaries. The new edition includes an additional "global territory" of the relational, positioning acoustics as a range of everyday practices that rework dominant tonalities. Questions of orientation and emplacement are critically raised, reframing listening as multi-modal and intrinsic to resistant socialities and what the author terms "acts of compositioning." The book is fully updated to include new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, as well as a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentialities inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface to the Second Edition Introduction: Your Sound Is My Sound Is Your Sound Sound studies Acoustic space Acoustic territories Chapter 1: Underground: Busking, Acousmatics, and the Echo Underground sonics Underground lives Resistance Echoic listening Chapter 2: Home: Ethical Volumes of Silence and Noise Interiors Suburb Prison Power Gated Acoustic community Chapter 3: Sidewalk: Steps, Gait, and Rhythmic Journey-Forms Pedestrian sounds The sonic body Riots, street fights, and demonstrations Marching Sidewalk acoustics Chapter 4: Street: Auditory Latching, Cars, and the Dynamics of Vibration Vibrations Beats below the skin Street smarts Taking it low Audible identity Boom Boom Boom Slow groove Chapter 5: Shopping Mall: Muzak, Mishearing, and the Productive Volatility of Feedback Muzak Distracted listening Acoustic politics Airports Atmospheres Chapter 6: Sky: Radio, Spatial Urbanism, and Cultures of Transmission Towering visions Transmission culture Media Airy city Pirate radio, Pirate territories Spirits Local and global Epilogue: Queer Listening, Acoustic Justice, and Acts of Compositioning Compositioning: Reworking relations Queer acoustics Notes Preface Introduction Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Epilogue Bibliography Index