Acoustic Territories

A remarkable exploration of how sound permeates all aspects of life - from the streets to our homes, and from shopping malls to the underground.

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.

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change. In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.

The rise of a prominent auditory culture, reveals the degree to which sound art is lending definition to the 21st Century. And yet sound art still lacks related literature to compliment, and expand, the realm of practice. Background Noise sets out an historical overview, while at the same time shaping that history according to what sound art reveals - the dynamics of art to operate spatially, through media of reproduction and broadcast, and in relation to the intensities of communication and its contextual framework

Radio Territories ISBN 0-9772594-1-2 / 978-0-9772594-1-0 Paperback, 7 x 9 in. / 280 pgs / 30 b&w. / U.S. $25.00 CDN $30.00 November / Nonfiction and Criticism

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it--and to have listened through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry examines the dual-edged nature of sound--its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma--within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient themselves within the fog of war.

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it--and to have listened through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry examines the dual-edged nature of sound--its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma--within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient themselves within the fog of war.

One of the country’s top voice-over talents shares his secrets of success in an insider’s guide to the industry. Actors, broadcasters, and anyone who has longed to earn a living by speaking into a microphone will cherish this insightful and often hilarious glimpse at the business. Coverage includes: • Identifying natural talent • Training a voice to make it commercially viable • Gaining experience in smaller markets • Making a demo CD • Auditioning effectively • Locating and signing with an agent • Joining the appropriate unions • Negotiating contracts • Self-promoting to maximize exposure Reflecting the quantum change that has occurred in the way voice-overs are recorded and cast in recent years, the updated Second Edition describes the advantages and disadvantages of auditioning and recording from home studios for clients around the world. This indispensable guide also addresses finding work in venues outside film and television, such as games, automated telephone systems, and websites. Aspiring and established voice-over actors will savor the behind-the-scenes details that show what actually happens during a voice-over recording session. Through it all, the author pairs performance tips with an expanded personal account of the crazed clients, practical jokes, and coincidences encountered on the long journey to success. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.