Acoustic Territories, Second Edition

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sounding and listening, and discusses how sound studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture, street life and sonic technologies, Acoustic Territories opens up a range of critical perspectives--it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by engaging auditory experience as found within particular cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces sound culture through a topographic structure: from underground territories to the home, and further, into the rhythms and vibrations of streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself as an arena of transmitted imaginaries. The new edition includes an additional "global territory" of the relational, positioning acoustics as a range of everyday practices that rework dominant tonalities. Questions of orientation and emplacement are critically raised, reframing listening as multi-modal and intrinsic to resistant socialities and what the author terms "acts of compositioning." The book is fully updated to include new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, as well as a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentialities inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

[An] important text for anyone involved in any form of sound studies., LaBelle, a sound artist and an academic, writes with a fluid brilliance about the way that sound interacts with the other elements of our experience with a kind of comprehension and comprehensiveness that can suggest Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media or Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command, resulting in a visionary tome linking history, subcultures and street art. It's not a book about music per se, but it's hard to imagine a reading of it not interacting creatively with anyone's thinking on musical practice and meaning. LaBelle has a kind of accepting overview that I can't help admiring. It's too easy to simply decry noise pollution or the behavioural engineering of public space without actually exploring what a specific event might mean (e.g., how sound is wrapped up in identity and issues of private and public space), but LaBelle has the ability to keep thinking where many others would just react. It's an ability that makes this one of the more stimulating reads of the year., Acoustic Territories takes account of contemporary urban space by listening to it ... From the underground to the sky, this groundbreaking book explores the sonorities of everyday life, identifies the major stakes and challenges, and leads us brilliantly towards an auditory paradigm of urban experience., LaBelle argues that everyday acoustic life has an unbounded, yet highly differentiated, nature which offers new interdisciplinary modes of thinking to contemporary questions of global inhabitation, relation and disruption. In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the expanding field of sonic research.

Brandon LaBelle is Professor of New Media at The Art Academy, University of Bergen, Norway, as well as an artist and writer working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. His books Background Noise, Second Edition (2015) and Lexicon of the Mouth (2014) are published by Bloomsbury Academic. He is the editor of Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, and an associated Professor at the Autonimia Akadimia, Athens.