Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sound culture and acts of listening, and discusses how auditory studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture and auditory issues, Acoustic Territories opens up multiple perspectives - it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by unfolding auditory experience as located within larger cultural histories and related ideologies.

Brandon LaBelle traces auditory life through a topographic structure: beginning with underground territories, through to the home as a site, and then further, to streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself. This structure follows sound as it appears in specific auditory designs, as it is mobilized within various cultural projects, and queries how it comes to circulate through everyday life as a medium for social transformation. Acoustic Territories uncovers the embedded tensions and potentiality inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

Reviews

"Acoustic Territoriestakes account of contemporary urban space by listeningto it...From the underground to the sky, this groundbreaking book explores the sonorities of everyday life, identifies the major stakes and challenges, and leads us brilliantly towards an auditory paradigm of urban experience." - Jean-Paul Thibaud, CNRS researcher at CRESSON, scientific coordinator of the International Ambiances Network (ambiances.net)
"LaBelle argues that everyday acoustic life has an unbounded, yet highly differentiated, nature which offers new interdisciplinary modes of thinking to contemporary questions of global inhabitation, relation and disruption. In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the expanding field of sonic research" -Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London
Author article and book mention in The Wire, April 2010
"LaBelle, a sound artist and an academic, writes with a fluid brilliance about the way that sound interacts with the other elements of our experience with a kind of comprehension and comprehensiveness that can suggest Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media or Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command, resulting in a visionary tome linking history, subcultures and street art. It's not a book about music per se, but it's hard to imagine a reading of it not interacting creatively with anyone's thinking on musical practice and meaning.LaBelle has a kind of accepting overview that I can't help admiring. It's too easy to simply decry noise pollution or the behavioural engineering of public space without actually exploring what a specific event might mean (e.g., how sound is wrapped up in identity and issues of private and public space), but LaBelle has the ability to keep thinking where many others would just react. It's an ability that makes this one of the more stimulating reads of the year."-Point of Departure

Author Bio

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and related Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives. In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project. His publications include: Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (Bloomsbury 2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (Bloomsbury 2014), Acoustic Territories (Bloomsbury 2010, 2019), and Background Noise (Bloomsbury 2006, 2015).