Podcast Editorial Statement

From its earliest moments as a discipline, sound studies has aspired to reveal new ontological paths which challenge the primacy of the visible in humanistic and scientific discourse. Soundscapes, as theorized by R. Murray Schafer, were a method through which sound practitioners and scholars might come to recognize the world, and its embedded social and natural ecologies, in a brand new way. Structural hierarchies of race, class, and gender have the potential to be revealed when people, place, and space are reconsidered through the lens of sound as opposed to sight. Indeed, the very texture of thought is altered when ideas are sounded as opposed to written, and so we at Sounding Out! present our podcast series, a space where we crank the volume on the sounds, squeals, and declarations of our contributors.

In our podcasts, we challenge our contributors to re-think the world through the sonic epistemologies of Toronto School McLuhanism and Schaferism. To recommunicate, deconstruct, and reconfigure their ideas through the aural tradition. Be it a digital art installation, sound collage, interview, presentation, soundscape, or formal “radio-style” broadcast, all of our podcasts demonstrate the power of sound to shape and tell stories in a fundamentally new and challenging ways. This is the aural record of sound studies scholarship, and it is through our podcasts that we pay homage to the roots and potential of sound studies as a fundamentally transformative brand of scholarship.

So please explore our panoply of podcasts by clicking the icons below, abandoning your eyes, and letting us guide you to the limits of our audible world.

-AT