Aural Diversity addresses a fundamental methodological challenge in music and soundscape research by considering the nature of hearing as a spectrum of diverse experiences. Bringing together an interdisciplinary array of contributors from the arts, humanities, and sciences, it challenges the idea of a normative listening experience and envisions how awareness of aural diversity can transform sonic arts, environments, and design and generate new creative listening practices. With contributors from a wide range of fields including sound studies, music, hearing sciences, disability studies, acoustics, media studies, and psychology, Aural Diversity introduces a new and much-needed paradigm that is relevant to scholars, students, and practitioners engaging with sound, music, and hearing across disciplines.

This book takes the position that the dynamic of the architectural environment is a key aspect of good design, yet one which is not well anticipated or understood. Environmental variety is a design characteristic closely related to our experience of architecture - an architecture of the senses. Each chapter demonstrates how an understanding of a particular context or environmental characteristic in dynamic terms informs design. The book is an antidote to the misconceptions of 'optimum' environmental performance or fixed criteria, instead embracing the richness of environmental variety.

A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

This companion explores a range of conceptual and practical relationships between sound and space across various disciplines, providing insights from technical, creative, cultural, political, philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives. The content spans a wide range of spatial typologies, from large reverberant buildings to modest and intimate ones, from external public squares to domestic interiors, and from naturally formed environments to highly engineered spaces. These compiled insights and observations explore the vast diversity of ways in which sonic and spatial realms interact. This publication therefore forms important bridges between the intricate and diverse topics of technology, philosophy, composition, performance, and spatial design, to contemplate the potential of sound and space as tools for creative expression and communication, as well as for technical innovation. It is hoped that by sharing these insights, this book will inspire practitioners, scholars, and enthusiasts to incorporate new perspectives and methodologies into their own work. Through a rich blend of theory, practice, and critical reflection, this volume serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the intricacy of relationships between space and sound, whether they are students, professionals, or simply curious. Our companion provides a cross-section through shared territories between sonic and spatial disciplines from architecture, engineering, sound design, music composition and performance, urban design, product design, and much more.

Re-examines notions of East and West in contemporary European cinema. This book presents a comprehensive investigation of Central European cinema in the early 21st century.

Sound and listening are intrinsically linked to how we experience and engage with places and communities. This guide puts forward a new conceptual framework of embodied affectivity that emphasises listening in urban research and design and advances new ways of knowing and making. The guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it. Urban Soundscapes foregrounds listening as an affective mediator between subjects and multispecies environments, and a vehicle to think and conceptualise environmental research and design beyond prevailing visual and human-centred modes. The guide expands landscape architects’ and urban designers’ tools and skills to assess existing soundscapes, predict how those soundscapes will be altered through their designs, consider sound as a creative and active part of the design process and envisage how users might perceive and be affected by those soundscapes as they evolve in time. The volume sits in the interface of research and practice and interweaves theoretical, methodological and creative contributions from acoustic ecology, ecoacoustics, bioacoustics and sound art. Each of the design stages is illustrated through project examples that demonstrate the many advantages of incorporating attentive listening and sound into Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Practice. This book shows how incorporating listening and sounding as part of the design process promotes slow and subtle ways of practice, adds social and ecological value through the reduction of noise pollution and by monitoring the health of habitats, and enables the design of soundscapes that complement the character and design intent of a scheme and elicit joy and wonder. The book will be of interest to practitioners and academics in landscape architecture, and other design and spatial fields such as urban design, architecture, geography and engineering, who play a primary role in the composition of the soundscape.

Sonic Rebellions combines theory and practice to consider contemporary uses of sound in the context of politics, philosophy, and protest, by exploring the relationship between sound and social justice, with particular attention to sonic methodologies not necessarily conceptualised or practiced in traditional understandings of activism. An edited collection written by artists, academics, and activists, many of the authors have multidimensional experiences as practitioners themselves, and readers will benefit from never-before published doctoral and community projects, and innovative, audio-based interpretations of social issues today. Chapters cover the use of soundscapes, rap, theatre, social media, protest, and song, in application to contemporary socio-political issues, such as gentrification, neoliberalism, criminalisation, democracy, and migrant rights. Sonic Rebellions looks to encourage readers to become, or consider how they are, Sonic Rebels themselves, by developing their own practices and reflections in tandem to continue the conversation as to how sound permeates our sociopolitical lives. This is an essential resource for those interested in how sound can change the world, including undergraduates and postgraduates from across the social sciences and humanities, scholars and instructors of sound studies and sound production, as well as activists, artists, and community organisers.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.

This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global South, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-consumerist cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties. Conversations with: Clarence Barlow, Sandeep Bhagwati, Rajesh K. Mehta, Sharif Sehnaoui, Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Hardi Kurda, Mario de Vega, Luka Mukhavele, Khyam Allami, Cedrik Fermont, Khaled Kaddal, David Velez, Juan Duarte, Youmna Saba, Abdellah M. Hassak, Mariana Marcassa, Amanda Gutiérrez, Syma Tariq, Alma Laprida, Siamak Anvari, Mohamad Safa, Debashis Sinha, Zouheir Atbane, Constanza Bizraelli, Jatin Vidyarthi, Joseph Kamaru, Surabhi Saraf, Isuru Kumarasinghe, Hemant Sreekumar.

In Fatih Akın's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akın. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akın makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some of Akın's key works—In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among others—Gueneli identifies Akın's unique stylistic use of multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Akın's films—including music and multiple languages, dialects, and accents—create an "aesthetic of heterogeneity" that envisions an expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature of Akın's decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli demonstrates how Akın's aesthetics intersect with politics to reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.