Acoustic Territories, Second Edition

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 sound culture and acts of listening, and discusses how auditory studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture and auditory issues, Acoustic Territories opens up multiple perspectives - it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by unfolding auditory experience as located within larger cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces auditory life through a topographic structure: beginning with underground territories, through to the home as a site, and then further, to streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself. The new edition includes an additional “territory” of the geopolitical, as well as chapters updated throughout to include new technology and network culture. The book is fully updated to incorporate heavier theoretical and practical application, includes new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, and includes a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentiality inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.