The questions of, “What is sound studies?” is a chimera. Answers to this seemingly unassuming question bring up a series of answers in the negative. For example: Sound studies is not a thing or a discipline. It is not a singular subject of study and it is not reducible to an easily definable set of methodological principals. The intellectual genealogy is not from musicology, history, anthropology, or media studies. It did not come from a single country, or time period, or ideology, or …

 

Attempting to answer this question leads down a rabbit hole to a dazzling place of ill-defined claims of un-disciplinarity (sometimes referred to as the late 1990s). The problem is that such answers emerge from logic of disciplines that stifle conversations about broader ideas. They frame the discussion to focus on what things “are” or “are not” rather than what they can do for us, regardless of our background, focus, or research questions. For me, it is much more productive to think of sound in terms of relationality, as Ana Maria Ochoa referenced in her talk here at Duke on Monday–via David Novak if I recall correctly. (See also her recent book on Aurality).

 

My research focuses on the histories of sonic technologies during the 1950s, a time of massive technological and cultural transition within the US. In particular, I seek to articulate the connections between small decisions made about sounds on records to larger discourses of race, technology, and music. To do so necessitates understanding technologies of sound as contingent on individual and collective uses based on both their possibilities and affordances. This notion of “technology” has this idea of relationality at its heart, since it is not the technology itself that matters but how people use it. I think of technology both as an object of cultural materialization and as an entry point into understandings of relations of power and ways of knowing the world.

 

Focusing on sonic technologies, in both its meanings, then, is not about “things” but people—their creativity, ingenuity, and artistry. I dare you to define *these* things in the negative.

 

Darren Mueller is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at Duke University.

 

Bibliography:

Anderson, Tim J. Making Easy Listening : Material Culture and Postwar American Recording, Commerce and Mass Culture Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. ” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 278 p. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

Feld, Steven. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra : Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New : Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Moten, Fred. In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire : Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

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