Jean-François Augoyard, Henry Torgue (eds.): Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (1995/2006)

“Never before has the everyday soundtrack of urban space been so cacophonous. Since the 1970s, sound researchers have attempted to classify noise, music, and everyday sounds using concepts such as Pierre Schaeffer’s sound object and R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape. Recently, the most significant team of soundscape researchers in the world has been concerned with the effects of sounds on listeners.

In a multidisciplinary work spanning musicology, electro-acoustic composition, architecture, urban studies, communication, phenomenology, social theory, physics, and psychology, Jean-François Augoyard, Henry Torgue, and their associates at the Centre for Research on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON) in Grenoble, France, provide an alphabetical sourcebook of eighty sonic/auditory effects. Their accounts of sonic effects such as echo, anticipation, vibrato, and wha-wha integrate information about the objective physical spaces in which sounds occur with cultural contexts and individual auditory experience. Sonic Experience attempts to rehabilitate general acoustic awareness, combining accessible definitions and literary examples with more in-depth technical information for specialists.”

First published À l’écoute de l’environnement: Repertoire des effets sonores, Editions Parenthèses, 1995

English edition
With a Foreword by R. Murray Schafer
Translated by Andra McCartney and David Paquette
Publisher McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006
ISBN 0773576916, 9780773576919
230 pages

Review: Kate Galloway (U Toronto Quarterly, 2007).

Publisher

PDF