Sound, Space, and the City

Sound, Space, and the City
Author: Marina Peterson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081220770X

On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life. In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization. At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers, Sound, Space, and the City conveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.

Music, Sound and Space

Music, Sound and Space
Author: Georgina Born
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1107310555

Music, Sound and Space is the first collection to integrate research from musicology and sound studies on music and sound as they mediate everyday life. Music and sound exert an inescapable influence on the contemporary world, from the ubiquity of MP3 players to the controversial use of sound as an instrument of torture. In this book, leading scholars explore the spatialisation of music and sound, their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of subjectivity, and the politics of sound and space. Chapters discuss music and sound in relation to distinctive genres, technologies and settings, including sound installation art, popular music recordings, offices and hospitals, and music therapy. With international examples, from the Islamic soundscape of the Kenyan coast, to religious music in Europe, to First Nation musical sociability in Canada, this book offers a new global perspective on how music and sound and their spatialising capacities transform the nature of public and private experience.

Sound Worlds from the Body to the City

Sound Worlds from the Body to the City
Author: Ariane Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-03-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1527531244

This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.

Stereophonica

Stereophonica
Author: Gascia Ouzounian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262044781

Episodes in the transformation of our understanding of sound and space, from binaural listening in the nineteenth century to contemporary sound art. The relationship between sound and space has become central to both creative practices in music and sound art and contemporary scholarship on sound. Entire subfields have emerged in connection to the spatial aspects of sound, from spatial audio and sound installation to acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. But how did our understanding of sound become spatial? In Stereophonica, Gascia Ouzounian examines a series of historical episodes that transformed ideas of sound and space, from the advent of stereo technologies in the nineteenth century to visual representations of sonic environments today. Developing a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, Ouzounian draws on both the history of science and technology and the history of music and sound art. She investigates the binaural apparatus that allowed nineteenth-century listeners to observe sound in three dimensions; examines the development of military technologies for sound location during World War I; revisits experiments in stereo sound at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s; and considers the creation of "optimized acoustical environments" for theaters and factories. She explores the development of multichannel "spatial music" in the 1950s and sound installation art in the 1960s; analyzes the mapping of soundscapes; and investigates contemporary approaches to sonic urbanism, sonic practices that reimagine urban environments through sound. Rich in detail but accessible and engaging, and generously illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams of devices and artworks, Stereophonica brings an acute, imaginative, and much-needed historical sensibility to the growing literature around sound and space.

Sound Space Design

Sound Space Design
Author: Don Albert
Publisher: Papadakis Dist A/C
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780620465700

A monograph on the ground-breaking work of Don Albert & Partners.

Music, Sound and Space

Music, Sound and Space
Author: Georgina Born
Publisher:
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2013
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781107308329

This book focuses on music, sound and space and how they have been employed to transform public and private experience.

Sounding Places

Sounding Places
Author: Karolina Doughty
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788118936

This edited collection examines the more-than-representational registers of sound. It asks how sound comes to be a meaningful ingredient in the microgeographies of place-making through the workings of affect, emotion, and atmosphere, how sound contributes to shaping a variety of embodied and spatially situated experiences, and how such aspects can be harnessed methodologically. These topics contribute to broader debates on the relations between representation and the non- or more-than-representational that are taking place across the social sciences and humanities in the wake of the cultural turn. More specifically, the book contributes to the fertile theoretical intersections of sound, affect, emotion, and atmosphere.

The Sound of Architecture

The Sound of Architecture
Author: Angeliki Sioli
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-05-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9462703213

How sound and its atmospheres transform architecture Acoustic atmospheres can be fleeting, elusive, or short-lived. Sometimes they are constant, but more often they change from one moment to the next, forming distinct impressions each time we visit certain places. Stable or dynamic, acoustic atmospheres have a powerful effect on our spatial experience, sometimes even more so than architecture itself. This book explores the acoustic atmospheres of diverse architectural environments, in terms of scale, program, location, or historic period—providing an overview of how acoustic atmospheres are created, perceived, experienced, and visualized. The contributors explore how sound and its atmospheres transform architecture and space. Their essays demonstrate that sound is a tangible element in the design and staging of atmospheres and that it should become a central part of the spatial explorations of architects, designers, and urban planners. The Sound of Architecture will be of interest to architectural historians, theorists, students, and practicing architects, who will discover how acoustic atmospheres can be created without complex and specialized engineering. It will also be of value to scholars working in the field of history of emotions, as it offers evocative descriptions of acoustic atmospheres from diverse cultures and time periods.

Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan

Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan
Author: Joseph D. Hankins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135018499

This book argues that sound – as it is created, transmitted, and perceived – plays a key role in the constitution of space and community in contemporary Japan. The book examines how sonic practices reflect politics, aesthetics, and ethics, with transformative effects on human relations. From right-wing sound trucks to left-wing protests, from early 20th century jazz cafes to contemporary avant-garde art forms, from the sounds of U.S. military presence to exuberant performances organized in opposition, the book, rich in ethnographic detail, contributes to sensory anthropology and the anthropology of contemporary Japan.

The Noisy Renaissance

The Noisy Renaissance
Author: Niall Atkinson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271077832

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.