Sounding Boards and Sonic Styles: The Music of the Skatepark
Welcome back to our summer series on “Sound and Sport.” In today’s post, Josh Ottum discusses the sonorous sounds and unique rhythms of the sport of skateboarding. For an instant replay of last month’s post, click Tara Betts‘s “Pretty, Fast, and Loud: The Audible Ali.” For May’s post, click Melissa Helquist‘s “Goalball: Sport, Silence, and Spectatorship.” Next month’s grand finale will feature a doubleheader on Brasil, with a post by Kariann Goldschmitt on the promotional sounds of FIFA 2014 and a podcast by Andrea Medrado entitled “The Sounds of Rio’s Favelas: Echoes of Social Inequality in an Olympic City.” We’ll close with another take on the Olympics, excerpted from David Hendy‘s recent Noise broadcasts for BBC Radio 4 on the politics of boos at the games. For now, get out your board, strap on your helmet, and prepare to jam. —J. Stoever-Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief
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Seven layers of screen-printed, sugar pine maple whack the concrete. Aluminum axles pivot on rubber bushings as they slide across steel coping. Circular, molded polyurethane encases lubricated bearings that spin in midair before slamming onto birch. Vocal cords are strained as exclamations are made in response to a maneuver. These are the unmistakeable sounds of the skatepark. As skaters ride through the park, a unique sonic tapestry emerges revealing a constantly shifting array of timbre, pitch, and rhythm. This sliding aural space is similar to the compositional flow between rehearsed maneuvers and improvisatory actions, connecting skaters in the skatepark to musicians improvising in a jam session.
Just as the results of a musical performance depend on acoustics of the venue and the idiosyncrasies of the instrument, the skater is beholden to a similarly complex signal chain. The aural atmosphere of the skatepark relies on the number of other players, as well as their chosen instruments, and unique approach to playing. While surveying the sonic and social dynamics of four skateparks in Ohio and California for this study, the line between performer and listener was often unclear. Skaters are consistently sliding between roles as passive observers and active participants, watching and being watched, making sound and listening to the sounds of others. And, just as an improvising musician aims to develop her own unique voice, the skater intertwines sonic and visual elements into a unique stylistic signature all her own. In this study I will look at the skatepark as a site for skaters to express themselves much in the same way that a musician plays an instrument at a jam session. I will explore the board and terrain, the importance of style, and the culture of the park itself. To begin, I will contextualize the ways in which the skateboard has been constructed as a sonic instrument.
The Instruments
As a skater lands an ollie in the Vans Skatepark in Orange, California, the sound of hard polyurethane wheels slamming against a hollow birch ramp emanates throughout the warehouse, entangling with distinctive sounds made by other participants. The listener is made acutely aware of each skater’s instrument and stylistic approach to performance. What differentiates the rider on a board in the skatepark from a guitarist playing in a rock club? Just as the materials of the electric guitar and its signal chain inform the sonic nature of the instrument, the skateboard and its engaged terrain sound out unique and identifiable characteristics of each device. I spoke with a skater at Flipside Skateboard Shop in Athens, Ohio about the specifics of wheel construction and his own personal preferences:
Abrasion test chart, Flipside Skateboard Shop, Athens, Ohio
Just like the layered wood of an electric guitar body, boards are made through a multistep manufacturing process that involves layering thin plies of wood. Maple is most commonly used with the relative flexibility of the deck determining qualities of audible resonance as a skater ollies or railslides. And trucks, which function as axles, can be heard grinding along a surface such as pool coping, a painted curb, or a handrail.
In order for these materials to make sound they must be controlled by a rider and engage with some kind of terrain. The combination of what materials are chosen and how they are used result in a rider’s unique approach. In the skatepark, skaters swathe themselves in clothing, pads, and helmets while riding devices wrapped in visual signposts of self-expression that sound out the priorities of the particular rider.
Sonic Style
Following Henri Lefebvre, Iain Borden speaks of the skateboard as a “lived component of the body, its actions and its self-image in relation to the terrain” (28). Similarly, from my time spent at skateparks in Ohio and California, I have noted the malleability of terrain as a domain to express one’s own unique style. Skaters use their devices as instruments, playing the park, repeating phrases, overlapping with sounds emitted from their peers. All the while, advertisements adorn both bodies and instruments and maneuvers mimic the iconic moves of sponsored skaters viewed in magazines. Visiting Focus Boardshop across the street from the Etnies Skatepark in Lake Forest, California reminds the observer that the elusive, focal point of style in the world of skateboarding is not only confined to the visual realm. As reissued decks from Powell Peralta, Slimeball wheels, and multiple videos adorn the walls of the shop, teenage skaters hang out, asking to bend and stand on decks and spin wheels, all the while watching and listening to newly released videos. Just as guitars and synthesizers reflect the users aesthetic outlook, the look and sound of skateboards signal to a skater’s audience (often other skaters in the park) what kind of skater he or she is.
Tara Rodgers’ insightful article on wood paneling on synthesizers for Sounding Out! has its analogue in the spiritual aura of the object in skateboarding. Bound up in this aura are genre-shaping histories that have taken the sport in innumerable directions. Whether it is the catwalk ethos of Vision Street Wear, Danny Way’s connection with Monster and Red Bull energy drinks, or enjoi’s self-referential marketing, the graphics that wrap around skate gear carry with them weighty connections to the sport’s most original moments. These moments are, of course, defined by marketing campaigns, hosted in influential magazines such as Thrasher and Transworld, and the zietgeist of the time. Intertwined with these branded materials is the sonic quality of the instrument. The sound of the instrument itself reflects the particular ethos of the skater who selected it. In the clip below, an employee working at Focus Boardshop in Lake Forest, California talks about the particular way his board’s sound reflects the idiosyncratic nature of its components. Notice how he skater speaks about the sound of his bearings as a direct link to his style, connecting to Borden’s idea of the board as a lived component of the body.
During my visit to the community skatepark in Athens, Ohio I come across two skaters who have returned to the sport after a two-decade break. One skater sports a longboard with 70a wheels so soft you can’t hear him skate through the concrete pool. Immediately after interacting with the longboarder, another skater finishes a session in the pool at the Athens skatepark with a long slide. I ask him about the role of his wheels and what he calls “the best sound in the world”:
Soft Wheels
Hard Wheels
Skaters related the histories of their boards to me with a sense of fond nostalgia. These histories functioned, primarily, as a mode of individuation, through which those observed were seen refining their identities within the community through conversation. As more time is spent at each of the parks, I begin to notice communal flows of conversation between skaters and their engaged terrain as well. Competitive aspects to out-do each other, synchronized maneuvers, and vocal responses are percolate the soundscape. As listeners perform and performers listen, connections with well-formed cultural codes of improvisational music begin to emerge.
Jamming the Skatepark
Improvising musicians often use the context of the jam session as an opportunity work out new ideas and rehearse repertoire. Minton’s Playhouse in New York is one of the original sites for the jazz jam session. Here, “cutting contests” allowed players the opporunity to outplay each other with virtuosic displays of improvisational prowess. Musicians play to hear each other individually and as a unit, often pushing each other to extremes. The sound is composed, listened to, and then reacted to. Skateparks provide a similar atmosphere. A trick (like an ollie) is immersed in the sonic flows of the surrounding skaters. The skatepark is simultaneously encouraging and competitive, forgiving and relentless.
When I visited the Vans Skatepark on National Go Skateboarding Day park employees tempted skaters to display their best moves throughout the park with the promise of free swag. The environment remained friendly and encouraging as skaters rose to the challenge, welcoming the pressure.
The rituals of the skatepark are varied in their scope. When a skater lands a difficult trick, it is common to hear the tapping of board tails on the ground; applause. Vocal reactions to maneuvers (landed or failed) are also quite common.
What sets the sonic atmosphere of the skatepark apart from the sound of skating outside the park is the palpable lack of intruding sounds from the outside world. As communities continue to accept the skatepark as part of their permanent landscape, the once transgressive sound of the sport takes on a new meaning. The scrapes and slides that once signaled intrusion are now contained in a controlled space. While visiting these jam sessions, it became clear that the sounds of the skatepark remain a mostly male-dominated activity. While the instruments and terrain remain available to the wider public the sound of the skatepark reflects a relatively closed environment often shrouded in platitudes of youth culture. However, once a sense of acceptance and experimentation is cultivated, some other aspects of the skatepark are revealed. The skatepark is a place to play and explore the range of one’s repertoire. It is a place to engage with the limitations of the instrument and one’s own physical faculties. And, it is an environment that encourages friction, noise, and distortion. The skatepark is a communal amplifier, obscuring and reflecting sound as the players immerse themselves in the ultimate sounding board.
Bonus Material:
While immersing myself in the sounds of the skatepark for this project, the idea came up to reimagine the sounds of the skatepark as a musical composition. I asked musicians Michael Deakers, Casey Foubert, Junior High, and Ryan Richter to make a piece that used any portion of the recordings of the four skateparks I visited. Their work reflects a deep connection to the rehearsed and improvisational aspects of music-making and skateboarding. The sounds of these pieces emerged from hours of practice and spontaneous decisions allowing for a particularly effervescent creative outcome. To hear these, check out out my Soundcloud here.
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Featured Image, “Grinding” courtesy of Luke Hayfield Photography
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Josh Ottum holds an MFA in Integrated Composition Improvisation and Technology from UC Irvine and is currently a PhD student at Ohio University in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts. His research interests include sound, energy extraction, Van Dyke Parks, Southern California, library music, and synthesizers. As a singer-songwriter, composer, and producer, Josh has released multiple records on various labels, completed numerous international tours, and composed music that has appeared on MTV, AMC’s Mad Men, and NPR.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Tofu, Steak, and a Smoke Alarm: The Food Network’s Chopped & the Sonic Art of Cooking“–Seth Mulliken
“Sounding Out! Podcast Episode #5: Sound and Spirit on the Highway“–David Greenberg
“Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil”–Leonardo Cardoso
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Blog-o-Versary 4.0: Sounding Out!‘s Solid Gold Summer Countdown!
Click here to download our free Blog-O-Versary 4.0 Mix!
Happy SO! Blog-o-Versary 4.0 to readers, writers, and supporters! Before I once again have the privilege of counting down some of the blog’s many blessings, I want to extend a big welcome to our new readers and a hearty thank you to those who have been down from day one. In our four years of publication, we have never forgotten that SO! is here because y’all are here, and this Blog-o-Versary is as much about commemorating the solid gold vibrancy of Sound Studies—a state we have all helped to bring about—as it is celebrating another year of our Monday morning offerings.
This year I, Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, dare to fill the glittering stilettos left by Dionne Warwick as your host for Sounding Out!’s Solid Gold Summer-themed countdown, along with co-hosts Liana Silva-Ford (Managing Editor) and Aaron Trammell (Multimedia Editor). As the beat of our latest Blog-o-Versary mix drops—don’t forget to download it here—I will count down the site’s top ten greatest hits of this past year, with some glimmers of how SO! will continue to thrive in year five! If you feel like bringing it like a Solid Gold Dancer, don’t worry, no one here will look askance; in fact, just try to stop us from catching that groove.
10. “On a Mission” (New Mission Statements!): You want to know what Sounding Out! is all about? Peep our new mission statement, hot off the presses by Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman and our new podcast editorial statement by Multimedia Editor Aaron Trammell.
9. “Suite Thursday” (Monthly Podcasts!): As of January 2013, Sounding Out! has moved to a monthly podcast format, coming to you on the last Thursday of every month. This year, we have brought you sonic dispatches ranging from ethnographic research on noise policing in Brasil, interviews with leading acoustic ecologists and Theremin masters, to audio documentaries of digital humanities sound projects such as #Tweetasound (Soundbox, Duke University). In addition to downloading from our site or subscribing via iTunes, you can now stream us on Stitcher!
8. “Thursday’s Child” (Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch!): Also as of January 2013, Sounding Out! has provided readers with an open, active comment forum in real time, where we discuss a range of topics such as 2012’s most memorable sound, the connection between sound and cinema, and the racial politics of listening. The Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch (or SOCK, as it is affectionately called around the editorial table), begins with a deceptively simple question penned by writers and editors, and lasts as long as the comments do. Whether you are a regular or are new to the scene, we’d love for you to join in this upcoming Thursday, August 1, 2013, when regular writer and Portugal-based multimedia artist Maile Colbert will incite discussion on psychological responses to sound. To peruse prior Comment Klatsches, click here.
7. “Celebrate” (Reception at ASA!): This year, SO!, was honored to co-host the first annual “Meet and Greet” of the Sound Studies Caucus at the annual American Studies Association meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was amazing to bring our virtual community into “meat space”—making new colleagues while keeping the old well-fed with happy hour snacks, drink specials, and excellent conversation. Look for more of these events at conferences with a sound studies presence in year five! For photos of the ASA meet and greet, click here.
ASA Meet and Greet, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2012 (from l to r) Marci McMahon, Eric Weisbard, Bill Boyer, Deb Vargas, and (far right) Sherrie Tucker
6. “Get it Together” (More CFPS/forums/series): This year Sounding Out! has brought you even more themed programming, integrating our wide variety of sound studies inquiry with Calls for Posts, seasonal series, and month-long forums that focus our content on key issues in the field. In year four alone, we brought you a summer series on radio auteur Norman Corwin, two forums on Sound and Pedagogy full of great ideas, examples, and syllabi, and a “virtual panel” with IASPM-US on the “sonic borders” in/between sound studies and popular music studies. We just wrapped up our annual July “World Listening Month” observance—which featured an exclusive podcast series from the 2013 Tuned City Brussels event—and we are still in the throes of our summer series on “Sound and Sport”—next up on June 29th, a post and a podcast by Josh Ottum on Sound in skate parks! On deck for Fall/Winter 2013, Aaron Trammell will curate a forum on sound and play (featuring the work of Cornell ludomisicologist Roger Moseley), Neil Verma will edit an ongoing series on Orson Welles (more details below) and I will launch a CFP for an upcoming forum on sound and the 19th century that will feature a post from Voxtap’s Caitlin Marshall.
5. “Come Together” (IASPM-US Joint Feature): Thanks to the collaborative super group of Justin Burton at IASPM-US and Liana Silva and myself at Sounding Out!, we brought you a six-week long interchange on “sonic borders” within and between popular music studies and sound studies. Featuring new scholarship from heavy hitters such as Devon Powers, Marcus Boon, Shana Redmond, Barry Shank, and Tavia Nyong’o and number-one-with-a-bullet newcomers such as Regina Bradley, Tara Betts, Airek Beauchamp, Theo Cafetoris, and Liana Silva, this joint “virtual panel” was listed in the program of the annual IASPM-US conference in Austin, Texas and posted simultaneously on both IASPM and Sounding Out!. Not to mention, it was a hell of a lot of fun. If you missed the series, click here for a rewind.
4. “New Kid in Town”: (Our first official Guest Editor!): As Sounding Out! continues to expand its reach and publication schedule, we will be calling on the intellectual and curatorial expertise of our colleagues. I am proud to announce that radio and sound studies scholar Neil Verma, professor at the University of Chicago and recipient of the 2013 SCMS First Book Prize for Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and Radio Drama—will be our first official guest editor, curating an exciting series on Orson Welles called From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio After 75 years. The commemorative series begins on August 4th, 2013 and will continue once a month through January 2014. It will feature new and exciting research from the likes of Tom McEnaney (Cornell), Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina), Jacob Smith (Northwestern), and Murray Pomerance (Ryerson and York Universities), as well as a broadcast on the 75th anniversary of “War of the Worlds” on October 30th, 2013.
3. “Turn My Swag On” (Logos, Buttons, and Stickers!): Thanks to Riverside, CA artist Dan Torres, Jersey’s finest Jimmy Buttons , and the good people at Los Angeles’s Blackstar Printing, Sounding Out! got visible, tangible, and walk-around-able this year with limited edition buttons and stickers. If you already have yours, wear and stick them proudly—and don’t forget to send us a photo to add to our growing “SO! around the way collection.” If you are in need of a little SO! swag in your life, there are three ways to come up on some: join our mailing list, network with one of our editors at a conference, or participate in the next SO! Comment Klatsch on August 1st.
SO! swag in Eugene, OR
2. “Everybody, Everybody” (Global coverage and audience grows!): As of Blog-o-Versary 4.0, Sounding Out! is being read in over 182 countries worldwide, a number that only continues to grow with our increasingly international focus. This year, we published pieces exploring youth street party culture in São Paulo, Brazil, chants of “Allah-oh-Akbar” from rooftops in Iran, post-liberation radio broadcasts in Africa, sonic legacies of the slave castles in Ghana, sonic artistic practices in rural Portugal, the “Tuned City” festival in Brussels, how South Korean students sound Shakespeare in Seoul, Canadian public school curriculum that enables students to remix recordings of political struggle and “media capitalism” in turn-of-the-twentieth century Egypt. Our world will only get wider in year five!
and,
1. “We are Family” (Advisory Board, Guest Writers and Podcasters): This year the Sounding Out! family continued to grow, adding an all-star advisory board, three new regular writers—a solid gold Sounding Out! shout out to Regina Bradley, Maile Colbert, and Primus Luta—and a talented cadre of over 30 new guest writers! And, as so many of you know, once a writer joins the SO! team, their number never gets retired. Because Sounding Out! is as devoted to producing community as it is content, we keep our guest writers connected, fostering their input, seeking their participation (SO! Tumblr correspondent, anyone? Contact Aaron Trammell at aht@soundingoutblog.com), and publicly celebrating their graduations, promotions—congratulations to newly-minted Ph.D.s Regina Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Ashon Crawley, Mack Hagood, and Nicolas Knouf and new Associate Professors Ziad Fahmy, Damien Keane and Samantha Pinto—publications, and other milestones! For more of what our talented and productive guests have been up to this year please read on below this post. As always, check in with our SO! Media page to keep up with Team Sounding Out! as our work spreads beyond our own .com to infiltrate websites, syllabi, reading lists, and print journals near you.
And most importantly, Stay gold, Team Sounding Out!, stay gold.
–JSA, Editor-in-Chief
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Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a 2011-2012 Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
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Click here for Sounding Out!‘s Blog-O-Versary 4.0 mix with track listing
(Just in case you missed last year’s 3.0 celebration–and mix– click here; for year two, click here; and for our first Blog-O-Versary party mix click here)
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Team SOUNDING OUT! Highlights Reel:
In addition to publishing THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali with Winged City Press in 2013, Tara Betts wrote for the character Maddy James in the multimedia dance show Any Resemblance that was presented as part of the La Mama Moves! Festival in NYC in June 2013. Tara is slated to present at Feminisms & Rhetorics at Stanford, SAMLA 2013 in Atlanta, and MLA 2014 in Chicago. “They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis” will be reprinted in About Place for their upcoming issue “1963-2013: A Retrospective of the Civil Rights Movement” edited by Black Earth Institute Fellow Richard Cambridge.
Regina Bradley completed PhD at Florida State University in African American Literature. Her dissertation is titled “Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21st Century Black Popular Culture and Literature.”
In addition to contributing “Sounding Shakespeare’s S(e)oul” this spring, Brooke Carlson is leaving Seoul, Korea, for Chaminade University of Honolulu in Hawaii, and is working on an article in progress: “Jonson, Sprezzatura, and the (Un)Doing of Nobility.”
Steph Ceraso defended her dissertation, “Sounding Composition, Composing Sound: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Pedagogies, and Everyday Experience,” and finished her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. She will be teaching at Georgetown University in Fall 2013. Ceraso was a guest co-editor with Jon Stone for Harlot’s latest special themed “Sonic Rhetorics” issue. Her digital audio piece, “A Tale of Two Soundscapes: The Story of My Listening Body” will appear in SoundBox’s forthcoming open access multimodal book, Provocare: A New Collection of Sonically Inspiring Projects. She will also be presenting a paper entitled “Sonic Rhetorics: Teaching Listening in the Multimodal Composition Classroom” at the 2013 Feminisms & Rhetorics conference at Stanford University in September. You can find out more about her work and upcoming projects at www.stephceraso.com
Maile Colbert had a residency at the iAir (International Artist Residency) at RMIT University. (Reel of the work created and synopsis: https://vimeo.com/66574320). She also completed the sound design and composition for the feature length documentary by director Irene Lusztig “The Motherhood Archives.” Maile presented “Wayback Sound Machine” at Musique et Écologies du Son/Music and Ecologies of Sound: Theoretical and Paractical Projects for the Listening of the World, Universitê Paris 8. She performed “Come Kingdom Come” at Sintoma: Performance, Investigation, and Experimentation, University of Porto, Fine Arts, Portugal. She performed with a new “field-recording” instrument with Andrea Neumann, Sabine Ercklentz, Marcelo Dos Reis, Angelica Salvi, Susana Santos Silva at Serralves em Festa.
Robert Ford was hired in February 2013 as the new play-by-play broadcaster for the Houston Astros major league baseball team.
Julia Grella O’Connell‘s book, Sound, Sin, and Victorian Religious Conversion, will be published by Ashgate in 2014. She recently made her debut with Syracuse Opera as Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro.
In August Amanda Keeler will begin a new position as an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the College of Communication at Marquette University.
Damien Keane completed his book Ireland and the Problem of Information, which will be published as part of the Refiguring Modernism series from Penn State University Press. In addition, his essay “Poetry, Music, and Reproduced Sound” appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis. Also, Keane came through to the other side of the tenure process at SUNY-Buffalo!
Roshanak Kheshti performed as Bluebeard (guitars and voice) at the UCSD Professor Unscripted event on June 5, 2013 narrating a biography through songs from concerts she has attended throughout her life. Some highlights included “Sweetest Taboo” by Sade, “Better Things” by Massive Attack, and “For Today I am a Boy” by Antony and the Johnsons.
Bill Kirkpatrick‘s essay, “Voices Made For Print”: Crip Voices on the Radio” appeared in Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era. In addition, he and Alex Russo started the Radio Studies Special Interest Group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies over the past year.
The 20th anniversary edition of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft is on its way this summer, with a new foreword by Greil Marcus. He will be speaking at CUNY Grad Center’s 20th celebration of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic this fall.
Primus Luta has been working on reshaping the breadth of Concrète Sound System, which grew from a live set to a label, but is coming to embody almost a philosophical approach to sound. The label saw several 2013 releases, including the Services Rendered project for which Luta did the art and music. Additionally, in 2013 he has taken to performing live again, specifically live free jazz with the group Odon which is fronted by Daniel Carter. He remains on the Rhythm Incursions podcast team, and is particularly proud of the “IDM is a MILF” episode from earlier this year. He was also given the opportunity to do a mix for Hank Shocklee at the end of 2012 which will likely get a follow-up before 2013 is done.
This year, Andreas Duus Pape had the agent he used in “Experiments in Agent-based Music Composition” and in “Further Experiments in Agent-based Music Composition” accepted for publication in Games and Economic Behavior (in joint work with Kenneth J Kurtz). A version of the paper can be read here. SUNY Binghamton is now offering Advanced Graduate Certificates in Complex Systems Science and Engineering, which is a program Pape helped found.
D. Travers Scott will publish “Refining Intertextuality as Resonance: Pet Shop Boys Score Battleship Potemkin” in the upcoming issue of Music, Sound and Moving Image. “Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962” was published in Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies in 2012. His book on technology and disease is currently under review. He is also the new Co-Chair of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Special Interest Group of the International Communication Association.
Aram Sinnreich’s new book, The Piracy Crusade, will be published in December. The book’s first draft is freely available to read at http://piracycrusade.com, and the final edition can be preordered via Amazon here: http://j.mp/TPC-AMZ
Jonathan Sterne released in 2012 MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Sound Studies Reader. In 2013 he published “What the Mind’s Ear Doesn’t Hear” in Music, Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience, and “Escape from Soundscape” in Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage.
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