Product Description

Vision is typically treated as the defining sense of the modern era and a powerful vehicle for colonial and postcolonial domination. This is in marked contrast to the almost total absence of accounts of hearing in larger cultural processes. Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense - from the intersection of sound and modernity, through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space. As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world. It answers such intriguing questions as: * Did people in Shakespeare's time hear differently from us? * In what way does technology affect our ears? * Why do people in Egypt increasingly listen to taped religious sermons? * Why did Enlightenment doctors believe that music was an essential cure? * What happens acoustically in cross-cultural first encounters? * Why do Runa Indians in the Amazon basin now consider onomatopoetic speech child's talk? The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth and hand, offers a way into experience. All five senses are instruments that record, interpret and engage with the world. This book shows how sound offers a refreshing new lens through which to examine culture and complex social issues.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #388548 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'There's no doubt in my mind that *Hearing Cultures* will become a classic in the developing field of sound studies. Not only does it offer inquiries into listening and hearing - which are pressing questions in the study of culture - but it also ranges widely across time and space, from Egypt to England, from the sixteenth century to the present. Think of it as mandatory reading, because it will be soon.' Anahid Kassabian, author of Hearing Film

About the Author
Veit Erlmann is Endowed Chair of Music, School of Music, University of Texas at Austin.

Customer Reviews

Only for post-post-modern theoreticians...
I ordered this book since I have for some time been reading a lot on jazz and African-American music, mainly from a player's perspective. Not a few of the books I have read have had an ethnomusicological outlook, and I kind of expected something like that from Hearing Cultures as well - some interesting perspectives on various cultural habits of listening and hearing.

Well, Hearing Cultures - at least the first few essays that I read - is mainly concerned with theoretical discussions on ethnological methodology. If you are into post-structuralist, post-modernist and post-postmodernist intra-academia debate, then, perhaps, this book is for you.

I am not into that stuff (I used to be interested in that kind of theoretical nit-picking in the 1980s), so Hearing Cultures was an unpleasant surprise.

Magnus Norden
Stockholm, Sweden