Sound Studies 101

Young, Mark. "Sound Studies 101." Part of the Feature 101 series. SFRA Review #305 (Summer 2013): pp. 15-19.[1]

Especially for those of us who value audiobooks and audio podcasts and/or insist that, as with an Elizabethan play, one goes to hear a film as well as see it — an important essay.

From the opening paragraph, describing the field:

At the junction point of cultural studies, musicology, popular music studies, ethnography, anthropology, philosophy, film studies, and media studies, a hybrid node of scholarship has been coalescing in the last ten years around the catch-all moniker of Sound Studies. Many credit film and music scholar Rick Altman’s essay “Sound Studies: A Field Whose Time has Come” (Iris, 1999) as the tipping point of contemporary Sound Studies research, and since its appearance a growing and varied base of scholars have been directing their attention to sound, music, and aural technocultural concerns in order to cultivate new perspectives on their respective fields [...]. Core research questions of the field include: How have new musical technologies shaped the conceptions of modernity, postmodernity, public space, embodiment, temporality, and conceptions of the human?; What cultural associations, gender distinctions, and racial dynamics get tethered to sonic semiotics, and by what processes?; In what ways does the filmic audio stream impact cinema production, mediation, and reception?; What sounds signify as other, alien, or threatening, and why?; [...] What are the musical politics of authenticity versus artificiality? [....]

Quotes with approval the comment by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. (from The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [2008]) "that 'the most orphaned of sf media is music. Little has appeared in print discussing the relationship between music and sf, a connection that is much richer than may at first appear' (11)" and goes on to note that most of the scholarship, so far as been in the context of studies of TV and film — and cites several examples (Young, p. 18).

We list this essay under "Graphic & Plastic Arts" because that is where we put video games and their descendants, where the soundscape is important, although not handled independently by Young in his necessarily quick over-view.

Includes links and a significant bibliography, plus reference to a number of works covered in Clockworks 2, e.g., THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE MATRIX.

RDE, finishing, 13Jul21