Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life

by Brandon LaBelle

Acoustic 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 beginning with underground territories, through to the home as a site, and then further, to streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself. This structure follows sound as it appears in specific auditory designs, as it is mobilized within various cultural projects, and queries how it comes to circulate through everyday life as a medium for social transformation. Acoustic Territories uncovers the embedded tensions and potentiality inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Urbanism

276 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Brandon LaBelle is Professor in New Media in the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen. He is the author of Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.

Reviews

[S. Alberto ⁻⁷ (yearning) · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the premise was intriguing, the execution left much to be desired. As someone reading this for my Sociology of Sound seminar, I was hoping for a more engaging and structured exploration of how sound shapes our everyday experiences and spaces. Instead, the book often felt overly abstract and meandering, making it difficult to stay invested in its arguments.

LaBelle certainly has interesting ideas about how sound interacts with urban environments, identity, and memory, but the writing style made these concepts feel unnecessarily dense and inaccessible. At times, the analysis felt like it was reaching for depth but ended up being convoluted instead. I was also hoping for a more cohesive structure—rather than a clear progression, the book seemed to jump between ideas without fully developing them.

There were moments of insight, particularly when discussing sound’s role in public and private spaces, but overall, this book didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped. It felt like a missed opportunity to present an engaging and thought-provoking study of sound culture. While it may appeal to readers who enjoy more experimental academic writing, I personally found it frustrating and difficult to connect with.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a series of essays about different aspects of sound (and many other unrelated phenomena) and cities than a book with a coherent thesis that reaches a definitive conclusion. Some interesting ideas, but many of those ideas are vaguely spelled out and protected by a layer of self-consciously academic language. I was disappointed at the way the book just stops almost in mid-thought, during a chapter on signal transmission that makes its way through pirate radio and somehow acts as if this is still relevant in contemporary cities. What about the transition from radio and television signal transmission to cable tv, the internet and mobile phones as signal-receiving signifiers? Without a conclusion to synthesize the ideas of each of the books disparate sections, there is little to take away from it in terms of how sound is integral to the urban experience as a whole. Why do city dwellers need to be attentive to their sonic environments? How are sculpted sonic spaces used by everyday citizens? Ultimately the answer to these and many more questions are more alluded to than presented.

[Stefanie Lubkowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was thought-provoking, but wasn't quite what I expected. It's more of a phenomenological/experiential analysis of urban environments in which sound plays a defining role, but the book is not exclusively focused on sound. There were things I definitely didn't agree with the author about, and a few instances where he seemed to know less about the physics of sound than the author of such a study should. But, it definitely stimulated my own thoughts about the sonic environment and its influence on identity, behavior, etc in a very productive way.

[Eugenie Santiago · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found myself struggling to finish this book. It read like a PhD thesis written by a robot. Agonisingly souless. As for the content, I didn't find as much about sound as I had expected by the title. I was attracted to the book because I'm currently doing research on soundscapes. There was not much in here for me. It starts quite well, but by the last chapter there's hardly anything on the subject of sound.

[Laçin Tutalar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book keeps opening up. Each chapter brings richness to territorial dimensions. I like that. I understand that the author did not try to reach closure about any of the components of sonority; rather, demonstrate how sound works through illustrative thinking: by fragmenting, in fragments, on fragments.

[Lee Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book to add to the reading list for the Chicago Architecture Biennial for its architectural metaphorizations of sound.  The writing is a bit scholarly (and sometimes vague), so it's probably not a book for "everyday reading", and more for deeper thinking.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a weird series of essays. Myself I could not get it.