AV Jiresh Sir Article

Review: Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?
Author(s): Michele Hilmes

Review by: Michele Hilmes
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 249-259
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068259
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Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? I 249
Is There a Field Called Sound Culture

Studies? And Does It Matter?
Michele Hilmes
TheAudible Past: Cultural Originsof Sound Reproduction.By Jonathan

Sterne. Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, 2003. 448 pages. $24.95
(paper).
The Soundscapeof Modernity:ArchitecturalAcousticsand the Cultureof
Listening in America, 1900 to 1930. By Emily Thompson. Cambridge,
Mass.:MIT Press,2002. 510 pages. $47.95 (cloth).
I posethe two questionsabovein the faceof mountingevidencethatthe study

of sound, hailedas an "emergingfield"for the last hundredyears,exhibitsa
strongtendencyto remainthat way, alwaysemerging,neveremerged.This
may suggestan answerto the second question:perhapsit doesn'tmatterto
enoughpeoplein enoughdisciplinesthat the studyof sound consolidateand
declareitself.Perhapssoundstudyis doomedto a positionon the marginsof
variousfieldsof scholarship,whisperingunobtrusively in the backgroundwhile
the main action occurselsewhere.This would echo the position that most
writerson the topic attributeto sound itself- constantlysubjugatedto the
primacyof the visual,associatedwith emotion and subjectivityas againstthe
objectivityand rationalityof vision,seen as somehowmore"natural" and less
constructedas a mode of communication - in essence,fundamentallysec-
ondaryto our relationshipto the worldand to dominantwaysof understand-
ing it.
However,two excellentnew books on the topic, buildingon the accom-
plishmentsof an impressive,and perhapsunprecedented,decadein the study
of soundartand science,mayhelp us thinkthe field differently:to redefineit
less as the studyof sound itself,or as practicesof auralitywithin a particular
industryor field, than of the culturalcontexts out of which sound media
emergedand which they in turn work to create:soundculture.These two
richlyrewardingadditionsto the workdone on auralculturein Americasub-
stantiallybroadenthe scope of what might be includedin the field of sound
250 I American Quarterly
studies, coming as they do from two very differentscholarlytraditions.Jonathan

Sterne hails from a media studies background, with a Ph.D. from the Institute
of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana; he now
teaches communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Emily Thompson
comes from a history of technology background,with a degree from Princeton,
a teaching position involving the history and sociology of science at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, and a senior fellowship at the Dibner Institute for
Science and Technology at MIT. Both books build on a growing bibliography
of work on sound, from many different disciplinary perspectives, and though
they take distinctly divergent approaches themselves, may indicate how the
field of sound culture studies, redefinedas a broad matrix, is coming together-
and why it matters.
Rick Altman, professorof cinema and comparativeliteratureat the Univer-
sity of Iowa, author of several seminal studies on sound and with the clearest
claim, if anyone deserves it, to the title of godfather of sound studies in the
United States, introduced a special "sound"edition of the journal Iris in 1999
with an essay titled "Sound Studies: A Field Whose Time Has Come."1 In it
he identified the present as the "fourth generation of Sound Studies," dating
its commencement back to 1980 with the publication of the YaleFrenchStud-
ies issue on sound, edited by Altman and later becoming his groundbreaking
work Sound Theory/SoundPractice.2Later,Altman would be instrumental in
founding a tradition of sound studies at the University of Iowa. However, this
body of work focuses almost exclusively on film sound, and indeed the study
of sound and cinema is perhaps the largest and best-developed area that must
be included in any attempt to delineate sound studies. Much of the best work
takes a fundamentally institutional approach, with Douglas Gomery's never-
published but nevertheless influential dissertation leading the pack,3 while
other studies combine consideration of the developing Hollywood economic
system with issues of aesthetics and practice, including Don Crafton'smagis-
terial The Talkiesand James Lastra'sSound Technologyand the American Cin-
ema.4Others, like Sarah Kozloff s OverhearingFilm Dialogue or Jeff Smith's
The Sounds of Commerce,examine one particularaspect of sound in film, do-
ing important work in analyzing its function within narrativesand calling our
attention to sound representation,to use Lastras phrase.5 Conceptually, the
most seminal work in this area is Michel Chion's Audio/Vision,an attempt to
theorize sound's relationship to the visual narrativeand to filmic perception
that most later historians and analysts draw upon.6 In film sound, at least, a
body of theory and analysis is developing, though its almost exclusive empha-
Is There a Field Called Sound CultureStudies? I 251
sis on sound in relation to the visual as developed in the cinema limits its
usefulness in other fields.
Another area of scholarship obviously relevant to any understanding of
sound as a medium of expression is radio. Here one encounters a double-
whammy: not only is sound marginalized generally but so has the study of
radio been, at least in the United States.7Though radio too has benefited from
something of a revival since the mid-1990s, and though there is one early
work in radio aesthetics to draw upon- Rudolf Arnheim's 1936 volume, still
available in reprint8- explicit consideration of radio as a sound medium, ex-
amining its modes of representationand diverse narrativeforms as specifically
aural and as such distinct from other modes, still remains in its earliest stages.
Both Sterne and Thompson touch on radio but find reasons not to engage
with it fully, as I will detail below. Most frequently cited by authors is Susan
Douglas s Listening In,9 which does attempt to think about radio's essential
aurality, though with the kind of sui generis panache that makes interesting
and intriguing points without worrying much about grounding them in any
particular critical discipline or body of thought. Others deal in fascinating
detailwith qualitiesunique to the radio medium, such as its capacityfor liveness,
the inherent instability of its in-visibility, or its emphasis on properties of the
voice,10but without an established body of theory in which to ground such
analyses, they remain isolated.
The field of music, too, has lent itself to the idea of sound culture as an
]
adjunct to the more properlymusicological study of musical forms and genres,1
though some of the most interestingwork in this areacomes from those trained
in history or American studies who venture into the field of music with fresh
earsand a different agenda. Often these studies place forms of musical or aural
expression into dense fields of social and cultural context, illuminating a par-
ticular era or phenomenon with music at its center, though the specifically
aural nature of music culture- organized around sound instead of vision or
other categories of experience- tends to get lost in the fascinating and com-
plex details of authorship, economics, social context, and reception. Some of
the most interesting to emerge lately include George Lipsitzs DangerousCross-
roads, Lewis Erenbergs Swingin the Dream, and Derek Vaillants Sounds of
Reform,12all of which focus, without much discussion of the concept, on the
disruptionscausedby a disembodied medium in an insistentlyembodied (raced,
classed, gendered) world. A related but separate body of work on the history
of recorded sound also must be included here, with works such as those by
William Howland Kenney, Michael Chanan, David Morton, and Andre
Millard.13Sound transmission media, such as the telephone and telegraph,

also have a place in sound studies, though with few exceptions, work has fo-
cused almost exclusively on their technological and institutional aspects.
Finally (for my purposes here, but surely not for the field) there is the arena
of art and experimental sound. Two of the best known writers and theorists in
this field are Douglas Kahn and Allen Weiss, and a recent collection of pieces
by radio artistsedited by Daina Augaitis and Dan Landercalled Radio Rethink
invites us to do just that.14Now that the internet has made creative and ex-
perimental audio work more widely available, we may be on the verge of a
new horizon in radio authorship; if anyone doubts it, go to the Third Coast
Audio Festival Web site and listen to the festival'smonthly selections of new
audio work, from documentary to soundscape.15Another good source for sonic
experimentation on the Web is the Experimental Sound Studio.16
One problem, however, lies in the fact that these various venues of aca-
demic work on sound phenomena so rarely speak to or take heed of each
other, and equally as rarely do they attempt to systematically theorize across
medium-specific practices.This is preciselywhere both of these two new books,
Jonathan Sterne'sin particular,make a critical and long-overdue intervention.
Sterne's book, subtitled Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction,avoids the
narrow categorization of medium or disciplinary tradition by situating his
study in the practices of aural perception: what he terms "audile technique."
Turning away from the tendency to focus on a particularfield of invention
and application of sound technology (e.g., music, recordings, radio, film) he
investigates the evolution of concepts of sound and practices of listening, and
the changes in social and cultural context that produced them. Arguing against
ideas of sound and hearing that assume a transhistoricalstate of unified sound
and vision that is disrupted by reproduction technologies - the idea of
"schizophonia"or "acousmatic"sound- he proposes that we shift our focus
to the history of the various ways that sound and hearing have been conceptu-
alized and described, and to the development of practices of listening that
have developed out of them. Sterne tracesefforts to understand the mechanics
of hearing and to reproduce and enhance their effects, from early devices such
as the phonautograph and the stethoscope to the refinements of the phono-
graph, the telegraph, the telephone, and radio and cinema. He argues that a
new "sonic regime"(33) emerges in the late 1800s and early twentieth century
out of an "Ensoniment" as profound as the Enlightenment to produce mod-
ern culture as we know it.
Beginning with the earliest experiments in producing a "tympanicappara-
tus" in the late 1800s such as Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake's
"earphonautograph," a "soundwriting"devicethatmadeuse of a realhuman

earat its center,Sternefirstembarkson an examinationof attemptsto make
sound visible,to transformit into some form of writingor inscriptionthat
could be measured,analyzed,understood.Theseeffortsgrewout of, and con-
tributedto, a developingscience of otology that sought to understandthe
sensoryperceptionof hearing,of the physiologyof the ear;what Sternecalls
"thetheoreticalabstraction of theear"(67). Of particular
interestarethe theories
of Hermann Helmholtz and of Emile Berliner,the latterbest known as the
inventorof the gramophone.However,Sterne'smain point is that while the
humanearformedthe basisfor earlytechnologicalinvention,the devicesthat
soon resultedfromthis periodof experimentationsoughtnot merelyto repli-
catethe ear'sfunctionsbut to extendand movebeyondthem in waysdictated
not by "natural" qualitiesof sound but by culturaland economic expecta-
tions.
The book then turnsto the distinctionbetweenhearingand listeningto
makethispoint,exploringthewaysthat"audiletechniques"developedaround
the stethoscopeas partof medicalpracticein the early1800s and in the new
professionof telegraphoperatorin the latterpartof the century.HereSterne
launcheshis deploymentof an explanatoryframeworkof modernity,in par-
ticularthe developmentof the middle classwithin industrialcapitalism,to
understandthe directionin which sound technologiesdevelopedtheirpriva-
tized,individualized,and, as he argues,commodifiedmode of listening;such
technologiesseparatedsound from other meansof communicationbetween
doctor and patient, messagesenderand receiver,and mandateda rational,
scientific explanation of the information gained. He focuses on the
professionalization of listeningvia stethoscopeor headphoneas an extension
of the middle or uppermiddle class,and the way that audiletechniqueen-
abled this new status. Most notably,such technologiesproduced"acoustic
space modeled on the form of private property allowing] for the
commodificationof sound"(162) as in mediaformssuchas the phonograph,
telephone,and earlyradio.
This aspectof the analysisseemsa littleglib;manyotherwaysof experienc-
ing sound in this period existed and, whetherindividualor public, found
differentwaysof enteringinto the marketrelationsof modernWesterncapi-
talism.Certainlysound and listeningwerecommodified,but it'shardto see
how this distinguishesthem fromotherculturalphenomena;in fact, Sterne's
own argumentagainstthe "schizophonia" hypothesisis undercutby the insis-
tencein thesechapterson the necessityto separatesound fromits materialor
visiblesourcein orderto privatizeandcommodifyit. It would not be difficult
to construct a history that showed the attempts to link such listening practices
with visualization or with publication (in the sense of making public), equally
commodified.
In other words, the analytical framework of modernity as employed by
Sterne- "the larger contexts of industrial capitalism, middle-class culture,
enlightenment science, and colonialism" (183) - while hard to argue with,
forms so broad and sweeping a landscape that the specific influences operat-
ing on sound get lost in the fray. More immediately, it allows Sterne to jump
all over the map in his analysis, focusing on those things that clearly delight
and intrigue him, while omitting aspects of sound history that might illumi-
nate or contradict his specific arguments. Nonetheless we are treated to fasci-
nating and important analyses of sound-mediated cultural phenomena that
few have explored, and certainly without Sterne'scapacity to make us see (or
hear?)things differently.And, to do his argument justice, he is far more con-
cerned with tracing the plasticity,contingency, and malleabilityof sound-based
experimentation before'itscapture by the systems of modernity than he is with
later structuring and fixing; his loose definitions of modern transformations
allow him to see connections and linkages between seemingly diverse tech-
nologies and practices that have not been traced out before. Thus, in the latter
half of the book, we are encouraged to examine the anxieties and opportuni-
ties that connect the telephone, the gramophone, and radio as sound dissemi-
nation technologies; to consider the genesis and meaning of the concept of
sound fidelity; to link mortuary science with the preservation of life from
beyond the grave in early phonography; to ponder the racist nostalgia trou-
bling ethnographic efforts to preserve Native American aural culture; and to
take into account the role of silence in sound.
This is a sprawling and ambitious book, flinging out ideas and perceptions,
jumping from episode to episode without too much attention given to tying
all its various concepts and tasks together. Thus one looks forward anxiously
to the concluding chapter, but in keeping with the rest of the book, it encour-
ages us to look onward to moreimplications and areasto study, not back. Yet
it can be called brilliant, in its Whitmanesque way. It mounts the most far-
ranging and conceptually stimulating consideration of modern sound culture,
unbounded by disciplinary and medium-specific considerations, that two de-
cades of sound study has yet produced. Sterne'sresearchis wide ranging and
impressive.Though I find his reason for not spending more time on broadcast
sound, surely one of the major aural innovations of the twentieth century,
unconvincing - he claims there is already a substantial body of work on the
subject- I look forward to other scholars taking up some of his concepts and
working them into the study of radio as a sound medium. This is a book that
all scholars of sound should read, to overturn some of our neat assumptions
about sound and its technological and cultural manifestations and to clear the
ground for new approaches.
By contrast, Emily Thompson's work, equally groundbreaking, is more fo-
cused and bounded. Her subtitle, ArchitecturalAcousticsand the Culture of
Listening in Americay1900-1933, gives an immediate sense of this, though
she brings to sound studies far more than this relatively narrow construction
might imply. Once again modernity takes center stage as a unifying frame-
work, and once again it fails to do the whole job: yes, the phenomena she
describes take place in the twentieth century, and hence are modern, but are
the central characteristicsof this modernity- defined by Thompson as effi-
-
ciency, commodification, and technical mastery over time and space really
the most relevant ones to the history she describes?One could just as readily
propose cultural hierarchies, national identity, and the rise of urban culture,
all of which play important, but under-acknowledged, structuring functions
in Thompsons work. A second similarity linking her work to Sterne's is its
emphasis on listening ratherthan sound production, though Thompson places
her emphasis on the spaces and places of public audition- the symphony
hall, the urban environment, the office building, the movie palace- rather
than in the more privatized practices Sterne analyzes. (Again I ask: What ex-
planatory force does commodification lend to the argument when it can be
used in such diverse and contradictory ways? Markets have existed since the
dawn of man.)
However, her work provides an absolutely essential addition to the body of
researchon sound in its attention to the physical environment in which listen-
ing takes place, and in the attempts to measure, define, alter, and disseminate
sound in twentieth-century public environments. Beautifully produced and
highly readable,Thompsons book begins with an engaging narrativedescrib-
ing the efforts of Wallace Sabine, a young Harvard University physicist, to
measure the acoustic quality of interior spaces with a view toward perfecting
the sonic design of rooms to suit their uses. Though his first effort involved a
Harvardlecture hall- whose seat cushions will hereafterremain famous- it is
the Symphony Hall in Boston that exemplifies the working through of the
groundbreaking "Sabine equation" predicting the qualities of reverberation
through space. This is followed by an extended discussion of the development
of audio engineering following Sabine, and the problems involved in captur-
ing something as elusive as sound in scientific measurements and formulae,
ending with the emergence of the "New Acoustics" and the Acoustic Society
of America. Chapter 4 turns to a broaderconsideration of sound in the urban

environment, in the context of changes in the physical nature of noise, the
ways in which it was understood by those who attempted to control it, and the
growing use of scientific measurementto chart its enormities. Here Thompson
diverts into a consideration of "noise"as defined in modern music, tracing a
brief but nevertheless illuminating history of modern American composers in
the elite tradition, as well as jazz at the other end of the social spectrum.
Chapter 5 will surely break new ground, even for those with some knowl-
edge of the general issuesThompson has been discussing: the rise of the acous-
tic materials industry. New building methods in twentieth-century skyscrap-
ers and "efficient"office buildings, as well as the often noisy workings of the
machines inside them such as typewritersand air conditioners, mandated new
ways of managing sound. Thompson traces the development of acoustic tiles
and wall treatments, noting some of the contradictions at play. St. Thomas's
Church on Fifth Avenue in New YorkCity reflects in its architecturethe back-
ward-looking romanticism of its primary sponsor, Ralph Adams Cram; yet in
order to preserveits Gothic peace from the urban environment outside, it was
lined with one of the first mass-produced acoustic tile products, textured to
look like medieval stone. Another example was the New York Life Insurance
Building at 5 1 Madison Avenue, designed by architect Cass Gilbert, which
employed all the most up-to-date methods of quieting unwanted sound, in-
cluding lining walls and ceilings with sound-absorbing felt made of sterilized
cow hair and asbestos. As Thompson notes, "These materials didn't simply
eliminate the noises of the modern era, they additionally created a new, mod-
ern sound of their own" (171).17This modern sound rejected the basic notion
on which sonic engineering was created, the relationship between sound and
space expressed by Wallace Sabine's primary principle, reverberation,which
Thompson links to "a larger cultural matrix of modernity dedicated to the
destruction of space/time relationships"such as Cubist art, non-Euclidian ge-
ometry, and cinematic montage (172).
Those who come to an interest in sound through study of the media will
find the final chapter most valuable. Titled "Electroaucousticsand Modern
Sound, 1900-1930," it examines the construction of Radio City and
Rockefeller Center, and in particular Radio City Music Hall. As Thompson
claims,
Radios,electricallyamplifiedphonographs,publicaddresssystems,and sound motion pic-

turestransformedthe soundscapeby introducingauditorsnot only to electricallyrepro-
ducedsound but also to new waysof listening.As peopleself-consciouslyconsumedthese
new productsthey becameincreasingly"sound-conscious," and the soundthat theysought

wasof a particulartype.Clearand focused,it issueddirectlytowardthemwith littleoppor-
tunity to reflectand reverberateoff the surfacesof the room in which it was generated.
(233-24)
This argument has been made by the scholarsof cinematic sound on whom
Thompson draws, but here it is linked specifically to details of architectural
design. She connects Radio City s "soundscape"to the shift toward "individu-
alized" sound brought out by the phonograph and radio, summarizes work
done on early sound cinemas, and shows how renovation of the EastmanThe-
ater in Rochester, New York, compelled acoustical consultant Floyd Watson
to alter Sabine s founding formula to suit the new realities of media sound.
The Hollywood Bowl and the evolution of the sound recording studio are also
traced, as are the debates over Hollywood sound stage construction. Here her
work owes much to the pioneering efforts of Rick Altman, Donald Crafton,
James Lastra,and Douglas Gomery. With Carl Eyring'sdefinitive revision of
Sabine's equation at Bell Labs in 1930, Thompson argues, the modern
soundscape had arrived.
The book ends with a close examination of Radio City Music Hall, and
what it representswithin the history of architecturalsound. Built as a monu-
ment to the new technologies of aurality,Radio City itself, with its art moderne
sculptures, bas-reliefs, and photographic murals was meant to embody the
very essence of modern efficiency and science, and as the home of America's
most prestigiousbroadcastingnetwork,Thompson argues,"theimpact of Radio
City thus extended far beyond the bounds of midtown Manhattan, contribut-
ing to the nationalization of the modern soundscape" (306). However, this is
as far as Thompson wants to go in talking about how its impact might have
operated on radio as a cultural form, just as she avoids the issue for movies;
only modern classical music receives such extended consideration. As for the
music hall itself, devotion to ideals of technologized spectacle made it almost
useless for the purposes for which it had been initially built. Thompson argues
that the hall, opening in the depths of the Depression, represented a confi-
dence in technology, a growth economy, and progress that could no longer be
sustained.
Thompsons work opens up a new dimension in that hypothetical field we
might call sound culture studies, breaking free of the notion that sound is the
possession of particular forms of content, such as music, radio, or films, and
placing it in the physical space of its production and consumption. Though
her frameworkof "modernity"functions less as an analytical device and more
as a continuing trope, as with Sterne, it allows her the flexibility to develop her
argument in directions that interest her, though more attention to matters
such as class, elite vs. popular culture, and influences from outside the United
States might have led to a more contexualized analysis. Yet the depth of her
researchand the breadth of her scope make this book part of the new essential
reading for anyone interested in sound.
So we might return to the question, does the study of sound culture mat-
ter?The very fact that two such excellent new books, with their widely diver-
gent approaches to sound but with such important implications for scholars
across previous divides, have made their appearancein the last two years pro-
vides reason to think that it does. Yet there is another place we should be
looking. Both of the books reviewed, and most of those cited by the authors
and in this review,concern themselves primarilyor exclusivelywith the Ameri-
can experience. This is certainly an areathat deserves much more exploration,
but if our investigations of sound- surely one of the most elusive and bound-
ary-defying media of all- is to be kept strictly within national borders, we
will not only miss out on much that might add to our discussion, but we will
build on a tendency to think that the specific ways that sound culture devel-
oped in the United States are somehow necessary and natural. This is mani-
festly not so. Sound culture practices- from music to spoken work to concep-
tions of noise and silence; from institutions of production to conventions of
listening- differ greatly from culture to culture, and we would do well to take
this into account.
Just to mention one striking difference: because in Europe and in Canada
radio emerged from a very different set of cultural goals and expectations, a
considerably more extensive attention to aspects of sound culture has per-
sisted in many places, notably in Germany,France,the Netherlands, and Great
Britain. From the early writings of Berthold Brecht through Theodor Adorno
to work on experimental radio and sound availablenow via the internet, there
exists an alternative tradition of thinking about and thinking through sound
culture that largely escapes the notice of the American academy.18We should
be careful not to do with the variablesof sound culture what has been done to
sound generallyin this visual age:createa seemingly transhistorical,transcultural
essentialism that is actually predicated closely on an American model. These
two fine books help to open the door to sound culture studies, but many
directions must be pursued in order to get there.
Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? I 259
Notes
1. Iris:A Journal of Theoryon Image and Sound 27 (spring 1999), "The State of Sound Studies," ed. Rick
Altman.
2. Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory/SoundPractice (New York: Routledge, 1992); see also The American
Film Af##W(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), among others.
3. Douglas Gomery, "The Coming of Sound to the American Cinema: A History of the Transformation
of an Industry" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975).
4. Donald Crafton, The Talkies:American Cinemas Transitionto Sound, 1926-1931 (Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1997); James Lastra, Sound Technologyand the American Cinema (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000).
5. Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Jeff
Smith, The Sounds of Commerce:Marketing Popular Film Music (New York:Columbia University Press,
1998).
6. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
7. For this argument, see Michele Hilmes, "Re-thinking Radio," in The Radio Reader:Essaysin the Culture
History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, 1-20 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
8. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1936; reprint Salem, N.H.: Ayer Co., 1986).
9. Susan J. Douglas, Listeningln: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Random House, 1999).
"
10. See, for example, Jason Loviglio, VoxPop: Network Radio and the Voice of the People," in The Radio
Reader, 89-1 12; William Barlow, VoiceOver: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, 1999); and Allison McCracken, "ScaryWomen and Scarred Men: Suspense,Gender Trouble,
and Postwar Change, 1942-1950," in The Radio Reader, 183-208.
1 1. David Brackett's recent InterpretingPopular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), for
example, is a well-grounded addition to this field.
12. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads:Popular Music, Postmodernism,and the Poetics of Place (London:
Verso, 1994); Lewis Erenberg, Swingin the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform:Progressivismand
Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), among others.
13. William Howland Kenney, RecordedMusic in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory,
1890-1 945 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1999); David Morton, OJfthe Record:The Technology
and Culture of Sound Recording in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000);
Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes:A Short History of Recordingand Its Effectson Music (London: Verso,
1995); Andre Millard, America on Record:A History of RecordedSound (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
14. Douglas Kahn, Noise WaterMeat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999);
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, WirelessImagination: Sound, Radio, andtheAvant Garde(Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994); Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1995); Alan S. Weiss, ed., Experimental Sound and Radio (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000);
Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander, eds., Radio Rethink:Art, Sound and Transmission(Banff: Walter Phillips
Gallery, 1994).
15. See http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/ (accessed November 24, 2004). See also the New American Ra-
dio page: http://somewhere.org/ (accessed November 24, 2004).
16. See http://www.expsoundstudio.org/ (accessed November 24, 2004).
17. However, she goes on to say, "the modern sound was achieved through private commerce, not public
policy; it was experienced by individualized consumers, not citizens" (171). Really? Is it certain that no
government funds subsidized acoustic research?And did consumers check their citizenship at the door?
18. See, for instance, the Web site of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, http://cec.concordia.ca
(accessed November 24, 2004), for an introduction to some of this work, and also links to similar Web
sites in other countries. Adorno is certainly often cited, but the interplay between the "soundscapes"of
his European roots (which might include such factors as the institutional structure of German radio
and the cultural status accorded classical music) and the American media to which he applied his
analysis is not often taken fully into account.

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Review: Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?

Author(s): Michele Hilmes

Is There a Field Called Sound Culture

TheAudible Past: Cultural Originsof Sound Reproduction.By Jonathan

I posethe two questionsabovein the faceof mountingevidencethatthe study

studies, coming as they do from two very differentscholarlytraditions.Jonathan

Millard.13Sound transmission media, such as the telephone and telegraph,

"earphonautograph," a "soundwriting"devicethatmadeuse of a realhuman

of America. Chapter 4 turns to a broaderconsideration of sound in the urban

Radios,electricallyamplifiedphonographs,publicaddresssystems,and sound motion pic-

new productsthey becameincreasingly"sound-conscious," and the soundthat theysought

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