Sound Studies is the primary theoretical and empirical alternative to our understanding of media and culture by visual means. The field is now well established as a serious area of research and study. Concentrating on the history of audio media, Sound Studies explores the nature of sound and listening, and its role in modern experience and perception. Furthermore, the subdiscipline questions the adequacy of previous—visually based—epistemologies of media and culture to offer a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of central facets of everyday life, historically, comparatively and in terms of present-day experience. Sound Studies investigates the different ways in which people experience the world of sound and how sound is embedded in culture, history, institutions, design, architecture, and technologies.

If Sound Studies incorporates the sonic turn in Media Studies and coheres around Cultural Studies, it also extends into Urban Studies, Aesthetics, History, Architecture, and Anthropology. It looks at the wide array of sonic experiences in society to include sound, music, and silence. In so doing it goes beyond the traditional disciplines of Ethnomusicology, History of Music, and the Sociology of Music.

As research in and around Sound Studies flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Sound Studies gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Sound Studies is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For both, Sound Studies will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.