Sound Culture

Sound culture is an interdisciplinary field of studies which considers "the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does this from a much broader perspective than standard disciplines"

Sound culture differs from traditional academic fields such as sociology of music, ethnomusicology and history of music because it adopts a much broader perspective on music and sounds in the social world. Especially sound studies are interested in the connection between the development of the highly complex contemporary society and the ways people developed in order to manage and rearrange objects, discourses and practices involved in the listening acts.

A strong role in developing the sound studies is played on the one hand by the field of science and technology studies (cf. social construction of technology) inside which a clear definition of the field has been presented in the special issue of the academic journal "Social Studies of Science", nr. 34\5 (October 2004). On the other hand the approach of a cultural anthropology of sound (as proposed by Veit Erlmann and Holger Schulze) has currently a strong influence in shaping the basic terminology and research method of the sound studies: "Historical anthropology of sound and the senses implies a cultural critique from the side of experience and corporeality. Besides the sensory body of emitted sound and the sensory body of the historical listeners – there is the sensory body of the researcher as a (hopefully) sensible creature."