Sound culture

Sound Studies is an interdisciplinary field, which looks at the many different ways sound has differed throughout history, with an emphasis on keeping the scope broad. It can be broken up into six main parts, according to the work of Jonathan Sterne. These are: Hearing, Listening, Deafness; Spaces, Sites, Scapes; Transduce and Record; Collectivities and Couplings; Aesthetics, Experiences, Interpretation; and Voices.

The basic research methods and approaches of sound studies is still being determined by those within it, generally split along the lines of a cultural anthropological approach (Veit Erlmann and Holger Schulze) and one that is more in line with traditional scientific technological studies (Advocated by the journal Social Studies of Science).

Sound scholars look at ways in which sound interacts with the world around it, and the ways in which humans interact with that sound. Some are interested in reaction and change and some focus more on enduring, ‘true’ sound.

Two significant categories to what we hear and pay attention to are natural and technological sounds. According to R. Murray Schaeffer (through a survey of quotes in the literature), the proportion of nature sounds heard and noticed among European authors has decreased over the past two centuries from 43% to 20%, but not for North America, where it has stayed around 50%. Additionally, the proportion of technological sounds mentioned in literature has stayed around 35% for Europe, but decreased in North America. While technological increases have not been sonically noticed, the decrease in silence has been noticed, from 19% to 9%.

For the idea of listening, objects can be considered auditorily as compared to visually. The objects that are able to be experienced by sight and by sound can be thought of in a venn diagram, with mute and visible objects in the vision category, with aural and invisible objects in the sound category, and aural and visible objects in the overlapping category. Objects that do not fall into a specific category can be considered beyond the horizons of sound and sight. The common denominator for aural objects is movement.

Three modes of listening have been recognized; causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening. Causal listening, the most common, consists of listening in order to gather ideas about its source. Sound in this case is informational and can be used to recognize voices, determine distance, or understand differences between humans and machines. Semantic listening is when a sound is not only heard but also processed. When a sound is given meaning and context, as seen in speech and fluent dialogue. Reduced listening focuses on the traits of the sound itself regardless of cause and meaning.

Sound is heard through space. But this defining of sound and space is further nuanced by their interdependent existence, creation, and dissolution. This idea of the acoustic environment and its social inextricability has become a source of interest within the field of sound studies. Critical to this contemporary discussion of the symbiotic social space and sonic space is R. Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape. Schafer uses the term soundscape to describe "a total appreciation of the sonic environment," and, through soundscape studies, attempts to more holistically understand "the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change,". In understanding the environment as events being heard, the soundscape is indicative of the social conditions and characteristics that create it. In industrialized cities, the soundscape is industrial noises, in a rainforest the soundscape is the sound of nature, and in an empty space the soundscape is silence. Moreover, the soundscape is argued to foretell future societal trends. The soundscape is not just representative of the environment which surrounds it but it makes up its very essence. The soundscape is the environment on a wavelength that is auditory rather than tactile or visible, but very much as real.

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