Content area
Volltext
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Alexandra Hui , The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 2013), ISBN 978-0-262-01838-8 (hb).
Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill , eds, Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction (New York : Oxford University Press , 2012), ISBN 978-0-199-75939-2 (hb), 978-0-199-75938-5 (pb).
Reviews
For a couple of decades already, without quite coalescing into anything institutionally substantial, the sort-of-coherent, cheerfully vague academic para-discipline known as sound studies has survived and more or less thrived. The cultural historian Jonathan Sterne, probably its most prominent representative, has described the field as 'the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytic point of departure or arrival ... redescrib[ing] what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world'. 1Ferment may be overdoing it, but Sterne is right to highlight a curious aspect of sound studies - the fact that it is strongest when passing through or around its nominal object. The field, moreover, seems to have come to terms with this fact. There is much less, these days, of the sonofetishism that marked some earlier academic writing on sound. At its worst, this involved posing as the liberator of an oppressed mode of perception, while in fact acting as the huckster of an academic novelty. This stance was usually indicated by liberal use of onomatopoeia, exhortations to hear the din! and so on. These days, a steady stream of more substantial work is appearing. In general, the better it is, the more it takes sound not as an object in and of itself, but as a kind of provisional heuristic, a method for defamiliarizing social and historical landscapes.
This can all make for a field of cultural inquiry either excitingly fluid, or dubiously unstructured, depending on one's point of view. One reliable fallback framework might be the nation. Film studies, after all, long leaned on national cinema as a plausible organizing principle. But how useful is the nation to the study of sound, and vice versa? It depends. Take Germany, for example. It has, of course, a dauntingly rich variety of musical traditions - baroque through Krautrock, say - and of musical theories. Beyond...