Hearing Cultures: Essays On Sound, Listening And Modernity

Description:
Vision is typically treated as the defining sense of the modern era and a powerful vehicle for colonial and postcolonial domination. This is in marked contrast to the almost total absence of accounts of hearing in larger cultural processes. Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense - from the intersection of sound and modernity, through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space. As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world. It answers such intriguing questions as: * Did people in Shakespeare's time hear differently from us? * In what way does technology affect our ears? * Why do people in Egypt increasingly listen to taped religious sermons? * Why did Enlightenment doctors believe that music was an essential cure? * What happens acoustically in cross-cultural first encounters? * Why do Runa Indians in the Amazon basin now consider onomatopoetic speech child's talk? The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth and hand, offers a way into experience. All five senses are instruments that record, interpret and engage with the world. This book shows how sound offers a refreshing new lens through which to examine culture and complex social issues.

Review:
'There's no doubt in my mind that *Hearing Cultures* will become a classic in the developing field of sound studies. Not only does it offer inquiries into listening and hearing - which are pressing questions in the study of culture - but it also ranges widely across time and space, from Egypt to England, from the sixteenth century to the present. Think of it as mandatory reading, because it will be soon.' Anahid Kassabian, author of Hearing Film

Table of Contents:
But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound and the Senses Veit Erlmann Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology Bruce R. Smith Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space Paul Carter Language and Nature in Sound Alignment Janice B. Nuckolls Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music's Effects Penelope Gouk Ether Ore: Mining Vibrations in American Modernist Music Douglas Kahn Hearing Modernity: Egypt, Islam and the Pious Ear Charles Hirschkind Edison's Teeth: Touching Hearing Steven Connor Thinking about Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus's Walkman Michael Bull Writing the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927-1930 Emily Thompson

Author Biography:
Veit Erlmann is Endowed Chair of Music, School of Music, University of Texas at Austin.