Twenty-six letters account for the approximately 43 elementary sounds in the English language, which contains close to 500,000 words. Compiled and designed by Timothy Donaldson, "Shapes for Sounds" comprises illustrated charts that track the history and development of the written alphabet and its connection to oral traditions. Donaldson's text also elucidates the connections between speech and written language through his chapters that touch on the organs of speech, the physics of articulation, the naming of letters and the shaping of letters. An established typeface designer, Donaldson taught typography at Stafford College, England, and is a Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Fall is here, with all its wonderful visual delights—not just colors, but shapes! This clever concept book follows a family on a trip to a pumpkin patch and invites children to pick out shapes from the seasonal scenery—apple bushel circles, square hay bales, diamond kites in the autumn sky! Felicia Sanzari Chernesky’s sweet verses are perfectly complemented by Susan Swan’s gorgeous collage-inspired art.

This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse. Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities. Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago—a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

Reveals how the human sense of hearing manipulates how people think, consume, sleep and feel, explaining the hearing science behind such phenomena as why people fall asleep while traveling, the reason fingernails on a chalkboard causes cringing and why songs get stuck in one's head.

Six-time Grammy(R) award-winner Daniel Ho presents a unique approach to colorful harmonies. With Colorful Sounds: Creative Harmony Made Simple, songwriters can discover infinite ways to harmonize melodies beyond the obvious ear chords, composers can create moods and underscore scenes with a more extensive sonic palette, and players can execute unique voicings of extended chords with ease. Includes an audio CD demonstrating examples from the book.

A lively introduction to the study of how words are put together.

In this inventive board book with striking images, Christopher Silas Neal combines animals and noises to form unique, inventive sounds. Children will have endless fun guessing what brand-new, made-up noises will appear next! If a dog says bark, and a pig goes oink, a doggy-pig says . . . Boink, boink! Best-selling picture book creator Christopher Silas Neal is back with more delightful board books. A follow up to Animal Colors and Animal Shapes, Animal Sounds hilariously mashes up animals and the calls they make to create unique and funny noises that kids will love guessing and saying!

Three mice make a variety of things out of different shapes as they hide from a scary cat.

Spot the shapes on top of rolling waves and on sandy shores. This sea-based early learning selection features rhyme and repetition, as well as a full page summarizing the shapes for reinforced learning.

The Shape of sounds is a series of sound and visual art developed by synesthetic artistThe work explores how the invisible world of sound can manifest itself in visually through an overlapping of the senses.