Karin Bijsterveld

Stefan Krebs

Gijs Mom

Eefje Cleophas

Do you enjoy listening to music while driving? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments of your drive in which you can listen to or sing along with whatever you like? This book shows how we created auditory privacy in cars, making them feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiency. It follows them as they struggle against sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio and what it did to drivers' attention span. It explores how car drivers listened to their cars' engines to diagnose car problems, and appreciated radio traffic information for avoiding traffic jams. And it suggests that their disdain for the ever-expanding number of roadside noise barriers made them long for new forms of in-car audio entertainment. This book also allows you to peep behind the scenes of international standardization committees and automotive test benches. What did and does the automotive industry to secure the sounds characteristic for their makes? Drawing on archives, interviews, beautiful automotive ads, and literature from the fields of cultural history, science and technology studies, sound and sensory studies, this book unveils the history of an everyday phenomenon. It is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.

A History of Listening Behind the Wheel

Sound and Safe

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such »staged sounds« express the changing identities of cities? This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike. With contributions by Jasper Aalbers, Karin Bijsterveld, Carolyn Birdsall, Ross Brown, Andrew Crisell, Andreas Fickers, Annelies Jacobs, Evi Karathanasopoulou, Patricia Pisters, Holger Schulze, Mark M. Smith and Jonathan Sterne.

Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage

Soundscapes of the Urban Past

José van Dijck

In recent decades, the importance of sound for remembering the past and for creating a sense of belonging has been increasingly acknowledged. We keep "sound souvenirs" such as cassette tapes and long play albums in our attics because we want to be able to recreate the music and everyday sounds we once cherished. Artists and ordinary listeners deploy the newest digital audio technologies to recycle past sounds into present tunes. Sound and memory are inextricably intertwined, not just through the commercially exploited nostalgia on oldies radio stations, but through the exchange of valued songs by means of pristine recordings and cultural practices such as collecting, archiving and listing. This book explores several types of cultural practices involving the remembrance and restoration of past sounds. At the same time, it theorizes the cultural meaning of collecting, recycling, reciting, and remembering sound and music.

Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices

Sound Souvenirs

Trevor Pinch

Written by the world's leading scholars and researchers in the emerging field of sound studies, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies offers new and fully engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms. The book considers sounds and music as experienced in such diverse settings as shop floors, laboratories, clinics, design studios, homes, and clubs, across an impressively broad range of historical periods and national and cultural contexts.Science has traditionally been understood as a visual matter, a study which has historically been undertaken with optical technologies such as slides, graphs, and telescopes. This book questions that notion powerfully by showing how listening has contributed to scientific practice. Sounds have always been a part of human experience, shaping and transforming the world in which we live in ways that often go unnoticed. Sounds and music, the authors argue, are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, art, commerce, and politics in ways which impact our perception of the world. Through an extraordinarily diverse set of case studies, authors illustrate how sounds -- from the sounds of industrialization, to the sounds of automobiles, to sounds in underwater music and hip-hop, to the sounds of nanotechnology -- give rise to new forms listening practices. In addition, the book discusses the rise of new public problems such as noise pollution, hearing loss, and the "end" of the amateur musician that stem from the spread and appropriation of new sound- and music-related technologies, analog and digital, in many domains of life.Rich in vivid and detailed examples and compelling case studies, and featuring a companion website of listening samples, this remarkable volume boldly challenges readers to rethink the way they hear and understand the world.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license

Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s-Present)

Sonic Skills

Tracing efforts to control unwanted sound--the noise of industry, city traffic, gramophones and radios, and aircraft--from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

Karin Bijsterveld

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