After such seminal works as the The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, The Soundscape of Modernity, The Audible Past, or anthologies such as Hearing Cultures, it has become clear: sound studies are here to stay.
Over the past two decades, the field has seen the emergence of a broad range of themes ranging from mobile sound technologies and the sound of hospitals to underwater sounds. Increasingly, the contribution of sound studies is also being recognized in other fields of inquiry. In addition to established disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, media studies, and popular music studies, archaeologists, historians of medicine, and historians of science are discovering sound as a rich field of inquiry. Literary scholars are beginning to examine the representation of sound in literature and, perhaps more importantly, how a new awareness of sound may alter our sense of literature as a whole. Scholars in Society and Technology Studies and Actor–Network Theory are more and more looking to sound and sound studies for new answers to some old questions about subjectivity, rationality, and governance. Architects, finally, are increasingly thinking about sound as more than something that happens in spaces.
But sound studies are not only about sound as an object of study or about challenging the dominance of the visual in contemporary cultural practice. As the field widened it also gained a foothold in new institutional settings such as music conservatories, museums, and even tourist destinations.
All of this has enormously broadened the range of theories and topics scholars interested in sound now routinely cover in their work. Some of these developments are reflected in this issue such as the growing significance of object-oriented ontology, or the shift from an earlier focus on the sound–vision binary to other senses such as touch and its interconnections to issues of affect. Future issues may explore the intersections between noise and its numerous cross-connections to the psychology of trauma and violence or environmental pollution; the history and future of sonification; the politics of sound in early Chinese film; or the relevance of sound to the emerging field of animal studies.
Sound studies have also been at the forefront of new ways of representing sound in a variety of forms and media. Works such as Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth make us aware of the extraordinary wealth of sounds humans make with their mouths. Interactive sound maps open up new venues for understanding how sounds shape urban geographies and create new opportunities for a greater participation of sound-oriented projects in the digital humanities more broadly.
In future issues we also hope to initiate a broader conversation about sound across multiple geographic, social, and cultural spaces, and about how sound travels across such spaces, facilitating the formation of new communities and alliances in some cases while also creating new boundaries and distinctions in others.
Sound Studies aims to provide a forum for all these emergent ideas, theories, and topics, but it is also committed to an ongoing dialogue with some of the field’s rich legacy in areas such as soundscapes, sound art, film music, histories of listening, the tensions and synergies of sound and vision, and many others.