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SOUND STUDIES Keywords in Sound. Edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. [260 p. ISBN 9780822359036 (hardcover), $89.95; ISBN 9780822358893 (paperback), $24.95; (ebook), various.] Bibliographic references, index.
Keywords in Sound is a collection of twenty essays by twenty-one contributors outlining twenty key metaphors used by sound studies scholars. Arranged in alphabetical order-from acoustemology to voice-each chapter consists of an eight-to-twelve page discussion of the particular term followed by a bibliography. In addition to the two just mentioned, there are chapters on acoustics, body, deafness, echo, hearing, image, language, listening, music, noise, phonography, radio, religion, resonance, silence, space, synthesis, and transduction. In the introduction, the book's two editors, David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, describe it as a "conceptual lexicon," modeled after Raymond Williams's 1985 taxonomy Keywords, described by the editors as "the central reference for students of culture, literature, materials, and more" (pp. 1-2). Keywords in Sound is, by analogy, not meant to "end with description and classification" but "[integrate] the historical meanings that cluster around a particular term into a relational field of interpretation" (p. 2).
Sound studies is a relatively new term for a scholarly discipline that encompasses a long history and a vast number of other scholarly disciplines. To quote Jonathan Sterne, the author of one of the chapters in the book under consideration, "before there was a field known as sound studies, there were rich traditions of thought about hearing [and, this reviewer would add, other aspects of sound] in philosophy, theology, music, acoustics, psychology, physiology, education, interpersonal communication, ecology, anatomy, astronomy, sociology, history, poetry, art history, and many other fields" (p. 65). So why "sound studies"? Is it merely an umbrella term for all the above and more, or is there a new theoretical basis for the consideration of the concept and phenomenon of sound?
As Novak and Sakakeeny state in the introduction, sound studies approaches "the conceptual fields used to define sound . . . not as passive descriptions of sonic phenomena but as ideas that inform experience" (p. 1). So, as Tom Rice points out in his chapter on "Listening," instead of taking a merely physical or psychological approach, "sound studies research . . . emphasizes...