Karin Bijsterveld, José van Dijck (eds.): Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (2009)

“In recent decades, the importance of sound for remembering the past and for creating a sense of belonging has been increasingly acknowledged. We keep “sound souvenirs” such as cassette tapes and long play albums in our attics because we want to be able to recreate the music and everyday sounds we once cherished. Artists and ordinary listeners deploy the newest digital audio technologies to recycle past sounds into present tunes. Sound and memory are inextricably intertwined, not just through the commercially exploited nostalgia on oldies radio stations, but through the exchange of valued songs by means of pristine recordings and cultural practices such as collecting, archiving and listing. This book explores several types of cultural practices involving the remembrance and restoration of past sounds. At the same time, it theorizes the cultural meaning of collecting, recycling, reciting, and remembering sound and music.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009
Transformations in Art and Culture series
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9089641327, 9789089641328
218 pages

Authors
Publisher
OAPEN

PDF, PDF (updated on 2016-7-18)

Roland Barthes: Image Music Text (1977)

“These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” and “The Death of the Author” are also included.”

Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath
Published by Fontana Press, London, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1977
ISBN 0006861350

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Karin Bijsterveld: Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008)

“Since the late nineteenth century, the sounds of technology have been the subject of complaints, regulation, and legislation. By the early 1900s, antinoise leagues in Western Europe and North America had formed to fight noise from factories, steam trains, automobiles, and gramophones, with campaigns featuring conferences, exhibitions, and “silence weeks.” And, as Karin Bijsterveld points out in Mechanical Sound, public discussion of noise has never died down and continues today. In this book, Bijsterveld examines the persistence of noise on the public agenda, looking at four episodes of noise and the public response to it in Europe and the United States between 1875 and 1975: industrial noise, traffic noise, noise from neighborhood radios and gramophones, and aircraft noise. She also looks at a twentieth-century counterpoint to complaints about noise: the celebration of mechanical sound in avant-garde music composed between the two world wars.

Bijsterveld argues that the rise of noise from new technology combined with overlapping noise regulations created what she calls a “paradox of control.” Experts and politicians promised to control some noise, but left other noise problems up to citizens. Aircraft noise, for example, measured in formulas understandable only by specialists, was subject to public regulation; the sounds of noisy neighborhoods were the responsibility of residents themselves. In addition, Bijsterveld notes, the spatial character of antinoise interventions that impose zones and draw maps, despite the ability of sound to cross borders and boundaries, has helped keep noise a public problem. We have tried to create islands of silence, she writes, yet we have left a sea of sounds to be fiercely discussed.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262026392, 9780262026390
350 pages

Keywords and phrases
Anti-Noise, decibel, industrial noise, dB, National Physical Laboratory, noise abatement, Dutch, Netherlands, Art of Noises, earplugs, player piano, gramophone, World Soundscape Project, Trevor Pinch, Rotterdam, North Brabant, ICAO, Barry Truax, psychoacoustics, Breda

publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-4-11)