Sounding Out the City - Bull, Michael

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On buses, trains, and streets over the past decade and more, youths in particular but increasingly older people as well tune into their personal stereos and tune out city sounds. Why? What does the personal stereo mean to these people and to urban culture more generally? Does it heighten reality? En

Biographie:
Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. His many authored books include Sirens (Bloomsbury 2020) and Sound Moves, iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge, 2007). He is editor of the Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) and The Auditory Culture Reader (Bloomsbury 2003, and 2016), and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is a founding editor of the journals, The Senses and Society and Sound Studies....

Sommaire:
On buses, trains, and streets over the past decade and more, youths in particular but increasingly older people as well tune into their personal stereos and tune out city sounds. Why? What does the personal stereo mean to these people and to urban culture more generally? Does it heighten reality? Enable people to cope? Isolate? Create a space? Combat boredom? Far too commonplace and enduring to be considered a fashion accessory, the personal stereo has become a potent artefact symbolizing contemporary urban life. This book opens up a new area of urban studies, the auditory experience of self and place. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. Urban, cultural and anthropological studies have been dominated by explanations of experiences drawing upon notions of visuality. But culture always has an auditory component that shapes attitudes and behaviour -- perhaps nowhere more so than in the city where sound is intensified. This book challenges strictly visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. The author reformulates our understanding of how people, through the senses, negotiate central experiences of the urban, such as space, place, time and the management of everyday experience, and examines the critical role technology plays. This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a fresh and incisive approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, or media and communication studies....