From the ragtime one-step of the early twentieth century to the contemporary practices of youth club cultures, popular dance and music are inextricably linked. This collection reveals the intimate connections between the corporeal and the sonic in the creation, transmission and reception of popular dance and music, which is imagined here as ‘bodies of sound’. The volume provokes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation that includes scholarship from Asia, Europe and the United States, which explores topics from the nineteenth century through to the present day and engages with practices at local, national and transnational levels. In Part I: Constructing the Popular, the authors explore how categories of popular music and dance are constructed and de-stabilized, and their proclivity to appropriate and re-imagine cultural forms and meanings. In Part II: Authenticity, Revival and Reinvention, the authors examine how popular forms produce and manipulate identities and meanings through their attraction to and departure from cultural traditions. In Part III: (Re)Framing Value, the authors interrogate how values are inscribed, silenced, rearticulated and capitalized through popular music and dance. And in Part IV: Politics of the Popular, the authors read the popular as a site of political negotiation and transformation.

Body and space refer to vital and interrelated dimensions in the experience of sounds and music. Sounds have an overwhelming impact on feelings of bodily presence and inform us about the space we experience. Even in situations where visual information is artificial or blurred, such as in virtual environments or certain genres of film and computer games, sounds may shape our perceptions and lead to surprising new experiences. This book discusses recent developments in a range of interdisciplinary fields, taking into account the rapidly changing ways of experiencing sounds and music, the consequences for how we engage with sonic events in daily life and the technological advancements that offer insights into state-of-the-art methods and future perspectives. Topics range from the pleasures of being locked into the beat of the music, perception–action coupling and bodily resonance, and affordances of musical instruments, to neural processing and cross-modal experiences of space and pitch. Applications of these findings are discussed for movement sonification, room acoustics, networked performance, and for the spatial coordination of movements in dance, computer gaming and interactive artistic installations.

The Body in Sound, Music and Performance brings together cutting-edge contributions from women working on and researching contemporary sound practice. This highly interdisciplinary book features a host of international contributors and places emphasis on developments beyond the western world, including movements growing across Latin America. Within the book, the body is situated as both the site and centre for knowledge making and creative production. Chapters explore how insightful theoretical analysis, new methods, innovative practises, and sometimes within the socio-cultural conditions of racism, sexism and classicism, the body can rise above, reshape and deconstruct understood ideas about performance practices, composition, and listening/sensing. This book will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in the fields of sonic arts, sound design, music, acoustics and performance.

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, every night, sound systems stage dancehall sessions for the crowd to share the immediate, intensive and immersive visceral pleasures of sonic dominance. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature sound of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "sets" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks to play; and MCs(DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates - at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in a disembodied mind, that communication is an exchange of information, and that meaning is only ever representation.

What makes a body of sound appear as an aesthetic object as well as a method for knowledge? In Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds, Mickey Vallee argues that we must impose our sonic imagination onto the non-sonic, and embrace how we sound to ourselves, sound with our animal companions, and sound in very earth itself. From the invention of the laryngoscope to the role of the spectrogram, from the call of the bird to the tumble of a rockslide, from the deep listening of environmental immersion to the computational listening of bioacoustics research, Vallee offers a wide range of cases to convincingly argue that all life shares in a continuous, embodied and ethical vibration.

This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.

Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality. With the support of 100 illustrations, Leppert addresses music and the production of racism, the hoarding of musical sound in a culture of scarcity, musical consumption and the policing of gender, the domestic piano and misogyny, music and male anxiety, and the social silencing of music. His unexpected yoking of musicology and art history, in particular his original insights into the relationships between music, visual representation, and the history of the body, make exciting reading for scholars, students, and all those interested in society and the arts.

In this dramatic new approach to understanding personal health, Dr. Pelletier shows how lifelong good health is far more dependent on a positive, purposeful life orientation than on aerobic workouts and rigid low-fat diets. Sound Mind, Sound Body offers practical, effective techniques to help anyone achieve physical, mental, and emotional equilibrium and enjoy a lifetime of optimal health.

In 1931 Universal Pictures released Dracula and Frankenstein, two films that inaugurated the horror genre in Hollywood cinema. These films appeared directly on the heels of Hollywood's transition to sound film. Uncanny Bodies argues that the coming of sound inspired more in these massively influential horror movies than screams, creaking doors, and howling wolves. A close examination of the historical reception of films of the transition period reveals that sound films could seem to their earliest viewers unreal and ghostly. By comparing this audience impression to the first sound horror films, Robert Spadoni makes a case for understanding film viewing as a force that can powerfully shape both the minutest aspects of individual films and the broadest sweep of film production trends, and for seeing aftereffects of the temporary weirdness of sound film deeply etched in the basic character of one of our most enduring film genres.