The Senses & Society

VOLUME 10, ISSUE 1

PP 111114

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Book Review

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,

2012, 624 pages, HB 978-0-19-538894-7.
97.00/$160.00; PB 978-0-19-999581-3.
32.99/$50.00.

Reviewed by Michael Gallagher

Michael Gallagher is a human
geographer based at Manchester
Metropolitan University. His
research spans social and cultural
geography, sound and media
studies, urban studies, arts-based
research, childhood studies, and
social theory. He has a particular
interest in the sonic aspects of
spaces and places, their affective
potentials, and associated forms
of power, knowledge, and artistic
practice. Much of his work involves
ethnographic experimentation with
audio and other digital media.
m.gallagher@mmu.ac.uk

The field of sound studies, although not new, has

been expanding steadily over the last ten to fifteen years, establishing itself as a vibrant interdisciplinary area of research. During this time several edited
collections have helped to stake out the territory: Bull
and Backs The Auditory Culture Reader (2003), Cox and
Warners Audio Culture (2004), and more recently Sternes
The Sound Studies Reader (2012). The Oxford Handbook
of Sound Studies is another such volume, but unlike the
others its twenty-three chapters are all new work rather
than reprints of previous classic material.

111

The Oxford Handbook of Sound

Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch
and Karin Bijsterveld

The Senses & Society DOI: 10.2752/174589315X14161614601529

A Handbook for
Sound Studies

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Book Review

This is a hefty, substantial tome. For such a book to be worth

its asking price and shelf space, I think it needs to do four things:
(i)provide an overview of the field of sound studies, acting as a
general introduction to the area; (ii) offer broad coverage of the field,
sounding out some of its extremities as well as its central tendencies; (iii) add some new material, pointing towards further areas
of research; and ideally also (iv) find a way to include audio and
audiovisual media of some kind, to help decenter the dominance of
the written text and reflect the multisensory, multimedia interests of
sound studies scholars.
The book achieves all of these things, though it is stronger in
some areas than others. The overview function is deftly handled by a
clearly written introductory chapter. Seven sections follow, covering:
industrial and machine sound; sound in science and art (sections for
in the field and in the lab); bodily and medical sounds; edited and
designed sounds; the consumption of sound; and the relations between sound and digital media. Within these sections, wide-ranging
chapters spiral off into myriad topics.
Several key figures in sound studies write from their established
areas of expertise. There are contributions from Mark Smith on the
history of industrial sound, Michael Bull on iPods, Karin Bijsterveld on
automobile sound, Tom Rice on medical listening via stethoscopes,
and Mark Katzs on amateur mechanical music-making from the
player piano to hip hop and karaoke. For seasoned sound studies enthusiasts, there is also new work covering less well-trodden
territory, some of it by less well-known authors. For example, three
chapters deal with data sonification from a variety of directions.
Other highlights include a fascinating chapter on ornithological
field recording by Joeri Bruyninckx, a lively account of underwater
music and sound art by Stefan Helmreich, and a contribution from
Andreas Fickers exploring the radio dial, its cultural and geographical
resonances. The quality of the scholarship and writing throughout is
reassuringly high. Anyone with an interest in sound studies should
find plenty to chew on. The handbook works well as an encyclopedic
source to be dipped into for interesting nuggets of analysis across a
wide spectrum of topics.
The selection of material for inclusion and more importantly
what the book does not cover raises some wider questions about
the interdisciplinarity of sound studies and its limits. The handbook
displays a general leaning towards science and technology studies,
which is perhaps to be expected as the editors are both from this
field. To their credit, Pinch and Bijsterveld have taken care to balance
this out with contributions from sociology, cultural history, anthropology, musicology, and elsewhere. However, some disciplines of
potential relevance are left out or given only a brief treatment.
For example, there is little here from the field of sound arts research. While most sound artists do not produce the sort of texts
that would sit neatly in a handbook of this kind, the burgeoning field

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of related research might have brought something interesting to

the mix. This area of work is mentioned in the introductory chapter,
and reflected to some extent in Stefan Helmreichs chapter about
underwater sound practices, but the handbooks sections on sound
in science and art are rather weighted towards science. A fuller
contribution from the arts end of the spectrum might have made a
worthwhile addition.
Similarly there is little full-blown theory here. Most of the handbooks chapters have a strong empirical component, focusing on
some particular issue or aspect of sonic practice. While this makes
for an accessible and engaging collection, one or two more conceptual contributions would have been welcome, from a scholar such as
Christoph Cox or Steve Goodman for example, both of whom have
set out inventive theorizations of sound in recent years.
Furthermore, if the claims often made about the wide interdisciplinarity of sound studies are to be substantiated, it might be helpful
for collections such as this handbook to seek contributions from
scientists working with sound, such as psychologists, audiologists,
and acousticians. Maybe this is too much to expect from a single
volume given the radical differences in epistemology, methodology,
and discursive conventions that would need to be negotiated. But
such a truly interdisciplinary handbook for the study of sound, if it
were possible to produce, might be provocative in unsettling the
broad epistemological consensus that underlies the social-cultural
version of sound studies represented here.
Another area largely missed out of the handbook is acoustic ecology, or what could more broadly be termed soundscape research.
Again this is noted as a key influence in the editors introduction but
not really pursued further in the chapters. Acoustic ecology can at
times seem simplistically normative when compared with contemporary sociological and cultural studies, but one of the more thoughtful
scholars with interests in this area could surely have enriched this
collection. My own discipline of human geography also manages to
slip by unnoticed. Several social and cultural geographers, myself
included, have begun in recent years to investigate the spatialities
of sound, bringing new theoretical resources into play relating to, for
example, the sonic aspects of landscape, affect, embodiment, the
more-than-representational, and more-than-human. None of this
work has managed to make it into any of the recent collections on
sound studies, which suggests that the onus must be on geographers to do a much better job of building links outside the discipline.
The handbook has a companion website to which readers are
directed to hear and see illustrative examples relating to the chapters: audio clips, images, web pages, videos, and so on. This is a
welcome initiative. It has always struck me as ironic that scholarship
so concerned to displace the ocularcentrism of academia continues
to rely so heavily on the primarily visual medium of written text. Often
with sound studies, I find myself wanting to hear at least a little of

The Senses & Society

Book Review

Book Review

what I am reading about. The companion website points the way

to all kinds of lively and fascinating materials such as car adverts,
sonifications of various kinds of data, examples of music, birdsong,
hospital sounds, recordings of tugboat airhorns, and much else
besides. In itself, however, the site is rather rudimentary, amounting to a list of annotated web links. Embedded media might have
worked better. There also remains a considerable gap between the
text and the website, leaving the reader to do work to join up the
dots between the linked materials and the analyses presented in
the chapters.
None of these issues detract from the overall impression that this
is an extremely high-quality, wide-ranging collection with much to
recommend it. Those looking for an introduction to the field will find it
an excellent starting point, albeit one with certain (perhaps inevitable)
biases in its disciplinary scope, as noted above. There is also enough
new material here to appeal to those already well-versed in sound
studies. The handbook will therefore serve as a valuable reference
work in its field.

References

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Bull, M. and Back, L. (eds). 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader.

Oxford: Berg.
Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds). 2004. Audio Culture: Readings in
Modern Music. New York and London: Continuum.
Sterne, J. (ed.). 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. London and New
York: Routledge.