Sound and Sensory Studies (Bibliography)

**Last updated in 2017. All edits and additions are welcome.

Author: Hannah Adamy (University of California, Davis)

*The following resource list expands upon an annotated bibliography published in SEM Student News, Volume 13, Number 2: Sound and Sensory Studies.

Sound Studies’s intervention is, expectedly, the senses: how might attending to the senses and theories of the senses offer a means of reassessing entrenched methodologies and evidence previously overlooked in academic writing? This enterprise is solidly underway in music and its sister disciplines. Indeed, any inquiry that considers bodies and bodily experience as valid sites of knowledge could easily populate this resource list, but that would be an immense list. Instead, this list offers texts that have sound at their center, however sound-as-sense manifests in the particular context.

Because this list, like the Sensory Studies subfield, is intensely interdisciplinary, collaborative, and in rapid flux, please email risingvoicesjournal@gmail.com (subject line “Sound and Sensory Studies Resource List”) with any additional citations. Recommendations need not be sound-specific, as ethnomusicologists are comparatively new to the conversation. Any and all related sensory literature is welcome.

Abe, Marié. 2010. “Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sound, Space, and Social Difference in Contemporary Japan.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley.

Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. 2007. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. 1997. “Sense, Meaning, and Perception in Three Dance Cultures.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 269–87. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Bull, Michael, and Jon P. Mitchell, eds. 2015. Ritual, Performance and the Senses. New York: Bloomsbury.

Burnett, Charles, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk, eds. 1991. The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgment from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. London: The Warburg Institute.

Classen, Constance C. 1997. “Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses.” International Social Science Journal 49 (153): 401–12.

———. 1991. “Creation by Sound / Creation by Light: A Sensory Analysis of Two South American Cosmologies.” In The Varieties of Sensory Experience, edited by David Howes, 239–54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 1990. “Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon.” American Ethnologist 17 (4): 722–35.

Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside. New York: Columbia University Press.

Edensor, Tim, ed. 2010. Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. New York: Routledge.

Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

———. 1991. “Sound as a Symbolic System: The Kaluli Drum.” In The Varieties of Sensory Experience, edited by David Howes, 79–99. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 1996. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 91–135. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Gray, Lila Ellen. 2013. Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Griffin, Kit. 1991. “The Ritual of Silent Wishes: Notes on the Moroccan Sensorium.” In The Varieties of Sensory Experience, edited by David Howes, 210–20. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Howes, David. 2015. “Sensation and Transmission.” In Ritual, Performance and the Senses, edited by Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchel, 153–66. New York: Bloomsbury.

———, ed. The Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Howes, David, and Constance Classen. 1991. “Sounding Sensory Profiles.” In The Varieties of Sensory Experience, edited by David Howes, 257–88. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

———. 2014. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. New York: Routledge.

Ihde, Don. [1976] 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed. New York: SUNY Press.

Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Malnig, Julie, ed. 2009. Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Mason, Paul H. 2014. “Tapping the Plate or Hitting the Bottle: Sound and Movement in Self-Accompanied and Musician-Accompanied Dance.” Ethnomusicology Forum 23 (2): 208–28.

McMurray, Peter. 2015. “Archival Excess: Sensational Histories Beyond the Audiovisual.” Fontes Artis Musicae 62 (3): 262–75.

Mendoza, Zoila S. 2008. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2015. “Exploring the Andean Sensory Model: Knowledge, Memory, and the Experience of Pilgrimage.” In Ritual, Performance and the Senses, edited by Michael Bull and Jon P. Mitchell, 137–52. New York: Bloomsbury.

Meitnjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Neumark, Norie. 2017. Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Novak, David. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Park, Chan E. 2003. Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pink, Sarah. [2009] 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Potter, Caroline. 2008. “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 73 (4): 444–65.

Rahaim, Matthew. 2012. Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Rée, Jonathan. 1999. I See a Voice: Language, Deafness and the Senses – A Philosophical History. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Roseman, Marina. 1991. Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sakakeeny, Matt. 2010. “Under the Bridge: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans.” Ethnomusicology 54 (1): 1–27.

Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Schwartz, Hillel. 2011. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O – Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Mark M., ed. 2004. Hearing History: A Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

———. 2001. Listening to Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Spiller, Henry. 2017. “Sonic and Tactile Dimensions of Sundanese Dance.” In Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicology in Maritime Southeast Asia, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor and Kendra Stepputat, 13–30. New York: Routledge.

Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sterne, Jonathan, ed. 2012. The Sound Studies Reader. London, UK: Routledge.

Teffer, Nicola. 2010. “Sounding Out Vision: Entwining the Senses.” The Senses and Society 5 (2): 173–88.

Thompson, Emily Ann. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Van Campen, Cretien. 2007. The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weidman, Amanda. 2012. “Voices of Meenakumari: Sound, Meaning, and Self-Fashioning in Performances of an Item Number.” Journal of South Asian Popular Culture 10 (3): 307–18.