Sound Works

What is sound design? What is its function in the early 21st century and into the future?Sound Works examines these questions in four parts: Part 1, "Why This Sound?", presents an overview of the modern history of sound design. Part 2 is highly visual and provides a glance onto a sound designer's workbench and the current state of "Sonic Labor." Part 3 uses cultural analysis to explore our contemporary "Living with Sounds." The final and fourth part then proposes a series of anthropological and political interpretations of how “Sound Works” today. This book is not a manual on sound design; it instead argues for a cultural theory of sound design for sound designers and sound artists, for clients who commission a sound design and for researchers in the fields of sound studies, design research, and cultural studies

By wondering how to do things with sounds, this book opens a thorough and complex design theory of functional sounds. But rather than remaining confined to a strict design theory, this groundbreaking work summons some of the most recent and promising contributions of the social sciences, whether it be mediology or anthropology, semiotics or economics, critical or political theory, cultural or postcolonial studies. Without a doubt, this book is going to become an indispensable reference for those interested in everyday sounds., Sound Works is a novel and welcome contribution to the theoretical discussion on sound design, as the author manages to combine an unusually wide variety of perspectives and consistently connects and situates these diverse perspectives in relation to the conditions of everyday living in present hegemonic practices of consumer society. What especially stands out thus is the consistent focus on everyday living situations for both those who produce and those who encounter these sounds in all walks of life.

Holger Schulze is Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the editor of Sound Studies (2008) and Sound as Popular Culture (2016) and author of The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2018).