What Are Sound Studies?

Sound Studies is a very young and diverse field of research with a long prehistory. Since at least the 1970s, artists and scholars have been proposing ways to understand contemporary and historical modes of listening, the emergence of new listening devices, and how communities gather around sound experiences. This talk will provide an introduction to the more recent history of the field since 2004. It will also look at current developments in the 2020s to decolonize sound studies and investigate aural diversity. Finally, the talk will focus on examples of vernacular media culture that document how the cultural study of sound allows us to interpret life and culture – in the present, in history, and in the future.  

This lecture is first of the annual lecture series ‘New Directions in Sonic History.’ As part of the research project Sound Affairs: Sonic Histories of Foreign Relations, 1700-1990, a leading researcher will give an annual public lecture on the importance of the study of sound (and silence) in the science of history from various thematic, chronological, and disciplinary perspectives. Professor Josephine Hoegaerts will moderate the Q&A after the talk.  

Read more on the research project and the annual lecture series on the website of Sound Affairs. 

About the speakers 

Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research moves between a cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. He was visiting professor at the Musashino Art University Tokyo, the University of New South Wales Sydney, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Currently he works on The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies (with Jennifer Stoever and Michael Bull) and on The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums (with Alcina Cortez, Eric de Visscher and Gabriele Rossi Rognoni). Selected Publications: Sonic Fiction (2021), The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021, ed.), The Sonic Persona (2018), and Sound as Popular Culture (2016, co-ed.).    

Josephine Hoegaerts (moderator) is Professor of European Culture after 1800 at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the histories of speech and sound, especially in the context of modern democracies.