Introduction: The Future of Sound Studies

Abstract

The idea for this special issue originated with our collaboration editing a collection on sound and cinema called Lowering the Boom: Critical Essays on Film Sound. Our introduction, 'The Future of Film Sound Studies', situates the book's more specific contribution to the history and theory of film sound studies alongside an emerging body of scholarly work over the past few years on 'sound culture studies'. The claims on 'the future' in Lowering the Boom's introduction offer something of a challenge to scholars of both film sound and sound studies writ large to imagine the potential for interdisciplinary work around the academic study of sound. What flowed from this book project was a workshop panel on 'The Future of Sound Studies' at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in 2007, which in turn evolved into this set of position papers for a special issue of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.The SCMS workshop aimed to take up the challenge of delineating such a future by not only pursuing the theory and history of sound as an object of study but also by articulating cross-disciplinary methodologies and analytical approaches. The workshop participants (many of whom contributed to this special issue) drew from a wide variety of academic traditions and specialisations to represent the diversity surrounding sound studies, with each scholar examining sound in relation to other media, as well as considering the inclusion of philosophical and pedagogical approaches. The subsequent call for this special issue followed suit, seeking to engage such questions as: scrutinising the relationship between film sound studies and sound studies in general; defining 'sound culture studies' and the shift to cultural contexts; considering medium-specificity and its relationship to disciplinary boundaries; exploring the formal and aesthetic dimensions of sound; theorising a history of listening and subjectivity; querying how social scientific studies of sound can inform and invigorate sound studies in the humanities; reassessing the role of sound in film theory; and advancing the relationship between film sound studies and music studies.What becomes apparent from the range of the submissions here is that the field of sound studies is very much in the process of formation - a work in progress subject to ongoing transformations as it coalesces into its own distinctive field. Yet what is consistent throughout these contributions is recognition of how the lines of auditory discourse traverse traditional fields of knowledge, areas of growing interest, and emergent sites of analysis while being simultaneously aided and hindered by the power relations subtending the academic ordering of knowledge. Like the conundrum faced by everyone who writes on sound-related issues, many of our contributors argue for sound studies to render legible these relationships across academic disciplines. What is distinctive about sound studies is not merely its focus on a notoriously elusive object of study but moreover the field's insistence on a dialectical method, one that circulates between the imperatives of medium specificity and the cultural ubiquity of sound practices. Such a methodology emphasises constructing new strategies for analysis, developing new shared vocabularies, and articulating a transmedial approach to studying sound.Specifically, the discipline of sound studies functions best when it is able to combine analytical tools. Several authors here point out the need for a discursive, transmedial method of analysis, where the pedagogic tools of one field of knowledge are whetted and sharpened by those of another. By combining, for example, film music studies with philosophy or film studies with opera studies, the authors propose new models for analysis, and in doing so construct productive relationships across disciplinary lines. Most importantly, in an era of digital convergence, where the textual distinctions between media forms are rapidly falling away, it becomes even more important to develop these new models. …