The Routledge Companion series is adding a new title focused entirely on contemporary studies on sound art practices and processes, and it seems to be not simply a conglomerate of ideas, but a truly rich anthology of today’s main topics around sound studies, sound art, auditory culture, history, philosopy, musicology, etc.
The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, as it has been named, features 464 pages full of promising articles by many well-known researchers, artists and scholars in the field, whose articles where carefully curated by three authorities on the subject, editors of the book: researcher and composer Barry Truax, emeritus professor at Simon Fraser University, along with Marcel Cobussen and Vincent Meelberg, the masterminds behind the wonderful Journal of Sonic Studies.
All articles are organized in six main themes:
- Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and possibilities.
- Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound.
- Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening.
- Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound.
- Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography.
- Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed.
Go to Routledge site to see the whole table of contents, including the authors of the 36 articles in the book. It will be available on August 2 for $240. No ebook version is available at the time but it will be, probably, in the following months, as other Routledge companions have ebook versions. Pre-order is also available at Amazon.
