Street Sounds

As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.

Via memory, material objects, music, people and place, Hip Hop In The Sticks picks up where Scratching the Surface left off. Through the eyes of an adolescent rural hip hop head, questions of identity, heritage and one’s own location in the world emerge through rich lived experience. Often idiosyncratic, humorously dry, and underpinned by comprehensive and informative endnotes, Hip Hop In The Sticks presents a deep non-fiction contextual narrative, intersecting family secrets, a different sense of community and kinship, embryonic hip hop and graffiti practice. Hip Hop In The Sticks makes visible a different account of life in late 1980s rural Britain and an alternative version of hip hop history.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.

This book on the prize-winning African American playwright Ed Bullins is the first to chronicle the life and work of the man who dominated the New York theatre scene between 1968 and 1982. With his presentations of street life, Bullins transformed the Protest and Art-theatre traditions founded by W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke and made important contributions to black theatre.

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures is a fieldwork-based ethnomusicology textbook that introduces a series of musical worlds each through a single "piece." It focuses on a musical sound or object that provides a springboard from which to tell a story about a particular geographic region, introducing key aspects of the cultures in which it is embedded, contexts of performance, the musicians who create or perform it, the journeys it has travelled, and its changing meanings. A collaborative venture by staff and research ethnomusicologists associated with the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London, Pieces of the Musical World is organized thematically. Three broad themes: "Place", "Spirituality" and "Movement" help teachers to connect contemporary issues in ethnomusicology, including soundscape studies, music and the environment, the politics of identity, diaspora and globalization, and music and the body. Each of the book's fourteen chapters highlights a single musical "piece" broadly defined, spanning the range of "traditional," "popular", "classical" and "contemporary" musics, and even sounds which might be considered "not music." Primary sources and a web site hosting recordings with interactive listening guides, a glossary of musical terms and interviews all help to create a unique and dynamic learning experience of our musical world.

Makis Solomos explores the ecologies of music and sound, inspired by Felix Guattari, for whom environmental destruction caused by capitalism goes hand in hand with deteriorating ways of living and feeling, and for whom an ecosophical stance, combining various ecological registers, offers a glimpse of emancipation, a position strengthened today by intersectional approaches. Solomos explores environmental, mental and social ecologies through the lens of the history of music and current artivisms – especially in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary music and sound art. Several theoretical and analytical debates are put forward, including a theory of sound milieus and the biopolitics of sound; the relationships between music and the living world; soundscape compositions, field recording, ecomusicology, and the creation of sound biotopes; the use of sound and music to violent ends as well as considering the social and political functions of music and the autonomy of art, sonic ecofeminism, degrowth in music, and much more.

Scratching the Surface: Hip Hop, Remoteness, and Everyday Life presents the encounters of a young, rural teenager growing up in Devon, in the south-west corner of the UK as he engages with the evolution of hip hop, told through 28 particular and detailed memories drawn from the experience of the author. The book is divided into four parts, and situated between 1983 and 1986, explores the emotional growth, contextual questioning, and at times, naïve journey of the protagonist as he reflects on such minutiae as the price tags on record sleeves, the LED display on cassette players, and the zips on tracksuit tops. The author of Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism returns with a quirky contextual novella which unearths a less canonical hip hop history of the 1980s and expresses the innocence and obsessions of an only child growing up in the sticks, as he strives to make sense of his personal history, identity, and place in the world, through the often dialectic relationship between Devonian life and hip hop culture. This is the first publication in the new Rhythm Obscura/Headz Projects series which seeks to uncover the hidden histories of music cultures in Britain. Adam de Paor-Evans is an independent creative practitioner, ethnomusicologist and spatio-cultural theorist and was previously Reader in Ethnomusicology at University of Central Lancashire, UK. His research is focused on the relationship of the non-obvious, societal and regional-rural phenomena within music cultures. He leads the scholarly research project 'Rhythm Obscura: Revealing Hidden Histories Through Ethnomusicology, Practice Research and Material Culture' and has been an actively involved in British hip hop culture since 1983. Between 1989-1992 he was a member of pioneering Devon hip hop crew Def Defiance as Project Cee. He also performs original 45-only DJ shows under the pseudonym RARE~GRILLS.