Sound and Music

Abstract

Methods relevant to the geographic examination of the sonic world need to take into consideration this world’s two broad categories: sound and music. Although these methodologies may overlap, research focus and outcomes are quite different. Nor is this difference simply one of a physical versus a human geographic framework. Rather, the range of methods employed point to the complex ways that sound structures our experience and understanding of the world. The ‘cultural turn’ in geography in the 1990s led to an interest in the representation and interpretation of landscapes as art or texts, that can then be analyzed in terms of who created such landscapes and why, and how these creations have shaped social relations in that place. Yet even as such reconceptualizations of the landscape have enabled a more nuanced understanding of place and space, they retain a very strong dependence on a visual intellectual framework. Sound offers other ways of interrogating place. However, until recently, studies of place and space have been dominated by the visual, even in those instances where sound is purportedly the focus. For example, studies have examined sound and music as cultural signifiers and expressions of identity, as cultural products, or as markers demonstrating the diffusion of culture or social groups. The methodologies employed for these kinds of analyses are significant to geographical research but they do neglect the uniqueness of sound, the fact that our perceptions of place through sound are very different to that through vision. Geographical study of sound and music has led to critical and creative use of methodologies that explore the role of sound in our esthetic and affective experiences of place, as well as issues of social and economic relations and political agency. However, the nature of sound – its ephemerality and the difficulty in ascribing it meaning – has also led to developing methodologies that can take into account how sound actually acts in the world.