This volume reads the global urban environment through mediated sonic practices to put a contemporary spin on acoustic ecology’s investigations at the intersection of space, cultures, technology, and the senses. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework from the 1970s for documenting, analyzing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practices now common across the digital humanities. With the recent emergence of sound studies and the expansion of “ecological” thinking, there is an increased urgency to re-discover and contemporize the acoustic ecology tradition. This book serves as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecology’s focus on sensory experience, place, and applied research, as well as attendance to mediatized practices in sounded space. From sounding out the Anthropocene, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, to exploring citizenship and community, this volume brings the original acoustic ecology problem set into the contemporary landscape of sound studies.

Soundscape Ecology represents a new branch of ecology and it is the result of the integration of different disciplines like Landscape ecology, Bioacoustics, Acoustic ecology, Biosemiotics, etc. The soundscape that is the object of this discipline, is defined as the acoustic context resulting from natural and human originated sounds and it is considered a relevant environmental proxy for animal and human life. With Soundscape Ecology Almo Farina means to offer a new cultural tool to investigate a partially explored component of the environmental complexity. For this he intends to set the principles of this new discipline, to delineate the epistemic domain in which to develop new ideas and theories and to describe the necessary integration with all the other ecological/environmental disciplines. The book is organized in ten chapters. The first two chapters delineate principles and theory of soundscape ecology. Chapters three and four describe the bioacoustic and communication theories. Chapter five is devoted to the human dimension of soundscape. Chapters six to eight regard the major sonic patterns like noise, choruses and vibrations. Chapter nine is devoted to the methods in soundscape ecology and finally chapter ten describes the application of the soundscape analysis.

How does sound ecology--an acoustic connective tissue among communities--also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community? Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon--a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology--a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

"The introduction lays out the basic theoretical framework for acoustic profiling, a method for listening to films by way of acoustic ecology (and vice-versa). This method is based on a double critical movement. On the one hand, a sound ecology of the cinema entails the application of acoustic ecology's prescribed listening practices to film sound studies. On the other hand, a new way of thinking about acoustic ecology is born of film studies, a way to consider acoustic ecology's practice through film studies' long history of dealing with problems of fidelity and realism through recording technologies. This intersection of fields offers a necessary critical discourse for handling the challenges inherent in navigating acoustic ecology's media practices. The four dimensions of acoustic ecology are described as documentation, analysis, prescription, and composition, and it is explained how these dimensions can intersect with a variety of standard concepts in film sound theory. In turn, this introduction explains how the set of films to be analyzed across the book will demonstrate, enact, and challenge these dimensions through their mediality, defined here as a mode of reflexivity that emphasizes the role of media technologies in engaging with, rather than acting as barrier to, real-world space. The films expose the myth of vanishing mediation and invite audiences to reflect upon their approaches to the audiovisual construction of space so that we may carry this reflection out to the world beyond the frame of the screen and its surrounding walls. The intersection of acoustic ecology and film sound studies can make films work as both extensions of acoustic ecology and means for critically re-thinking the field"--

William Faulkner in the Media Ecology explores the Nobel Prize-winning author immersed in the new media of his time. Intersecting with twentieth-century technology such as photography, film, and sound recording, these twelve essays portray Faulkner as not only as a writer looking back on the history of the U.S. South, but also as a screenwriter, aviator, and celebrity. This fresh, interdisciplinary approach to Faulkner presents an innovative way of reassessing a body of literary work that has engaged readers and critics for over sixty years. Essays by John T. Matthews, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Stefan Solomon, and Donald M. Kartiganer assess how Faulkner's legacy has been shaped through media adaptation and public commemoration of his work. Jay Watson, Michael Zeitlin, Sarah Gleeson-White, Robert Jackson, and Sascha Morrell consider a range of media relevant to the creation of the writer's stories and ways to recalibrate traditional thinking about his writing. Mark Steven, Peter Lurie, and Richard Godden examine how the vastly different mediations of both cinema and money influenced Faulkner's work. Editors Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon have brought together some of the most prominent voices in Faulkner studies, along with a number of emerging scholars, to construct a portrait of Faulkner as a thoroughly modern writer, as much attuned to the evolution of the contemporary world as he was to the past.