UC Santa Barbara

Sound studies have found in noise a subject of deep fascination that cuts across disciplinary boundaries of history, anthropology, music, literature, media studies, philosophy, urban studies, and studies of science and technology. Noise is a crucial element of communicational and cultural networks, a hyperproductive quality of musical aesthetics, an excessive term of affective perception, and a key metaphor for the incommensurable paradoxes of modernity. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualizing sound, and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies.