In media studies, we are interested in the role played by media in society: the channels/tools/organisations that produce, store, transmit and deliver information, the content they provide and their effects on people and society.
There are ways of public communication that use uniquely or predominantly acoustic information. We call them sonic media. Although they have considerable influence on our lives, few people in media studies are really interested in research into communication by sound only. (But you can find exciting people and their projects by trying out the following links:
Karin Bijsterveld
Steven Connor
Wolfgang Ernst
Murray Schafer
Frank Schätzlein
So here I'd like to present some notes on the production, content, storage, transmission, and reception of sound in the past and present. Much of what I'll write here stems from contributions by the students of this winter's Sonic Media seminar.
There, we started with this kind of observations:
- Sonic media are all around us: radio; telephone; music in elevators, shopping malls and stores; mp3 players; audiobooks...
- Sound is an essential part of visual media products (films, tv-shows, computer games).
- Sonic branding: Many brands add a sonic logo to their visual symbols. Some sonic logos seem to be more popular than their visual counterparts.
- Many electronic devices were first only-audio, visual information being added later: telephone; satnav; audio recording (tape – computer);
- Writing, one of the oldest techniques of recording and transmitting information, was developed in order to represent spoken language.
- In the 19th century, a series of inventions were made that were used for recording and later reproducing sound (Gramophone etc.).
- The first electronic mass media were sonic: Radio broadcasting (and predecessors such as telefone concerts).
Our goals are to...
- understand the changing role of sonic media (especially broadcasting, recorded sound) in the communication of societies.
- get a good idea of the development of electronic media, starting with radio broadcasting in the 1920s.
- be able to analyse any sonic event – from a simple frog's croak to a complicated radio report.