This issue marks the 10th anniversary of Sound Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal. When the first issue appeared in 2013, the field of sound studies was beginning to make itself heard as an exciting new voice in the larger conversation within the humanities. Work such as Michael Bull’s Sound Moves; Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare; James H. Johnson’s Listening in Paris; Douglas Kahn’s Noise, Water, Meat; Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise; Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past; or Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity challenged the hegemony of ocularcentric discourses. Others had taken the study of sound into previously underrepresented terrain and sites of social and cultural production. Mark M. Smith mapped the soundscape of slavery in the American South; Janis Nuckolls wrote about language and nature in sound-alignment among the Runa of the Amazon basin; Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics explored the configuration of religion, politics, and community in the Middle East, and Karin Bijsterveld tracked the valences of noise in Western history between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth century. Meanwhile, Carolyn Birdsall published Nazi Soundscapes; anthropologist Stefan Helmreich took a submarine dive to the seafloor, exploring the multiple meanings of “immersion”, and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld listened with the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea to the sounds of the rainforest, coining the term”acoustemology” along the way. Yet others probed the realm of psychic trauma caused by anything from affective violence, noise pollution to physical torture. Finally, my own Reason and Resonance aimed at a revitalising a long-neglected dialogue between philosophy, the history of science, musicology, and otology, while Holger Schulze, Bruce Smith, and Paul Stoller put the study of sound in dialogue with the emergent scholarship of the senses more broadly.
A decade later, the way we think, talk, and write about sound has never been the same. As the Books of Sonic Interest section at the end of each issue demonstrates, numerous monographs on topics as varied as sound and psychoanalysis, sound and urban geography, architectural acoustics, sound in violent conflict, acoustic surveillance, the sounds of blackness, sound technologies, and many more appear on an almost monthly basis. Many academic institutions around the world now offer courses in sound studies. Sound maps are ubiquitous, and the world’s archives are producing more evidence of the phenomenal variety of past sonic practices than ever before.
As editor, I am grateful for having been given the opportunity of playing a small part in this success story, making the journal an incubator for emerging scholars and one of the leading outlets for cutting-edge scholarship on sound. But the work of an editor, much like sound itself, also is in large part a matter of reverberation, resonance, even volume. As for the first, I must thank the more than 250 authors who trusted Sound Studies as the preferred platform from which to join the conversation. 174 of those authors saw their work appear in print. The back and forth between them and the editor was profoundly rewarding, with the commitment of the authors to serious scholarship and the tremendous diversity of topics resounding through every issue. The feedback of innumerable peer reviewers and the responses to their comments by the authors contributed to the creation of a space in which a rich variety of perspectives were able to bounce of each other, building a truly interdisciplinary forum. Equally beneficial for this atmosphere of exchange and debate was the international scope of submissions. Research articles and review articles from twenty-three countries have been published: Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, UK, USA, and Zimbabwe. Staying with the sonic metaphor, I must also thank past and present review editors Nina Eidsheim, Jens Gerrit Papenburg, Marina Peterson, Zeynep Bulut, Andrew Kettler, and Lyndsey Copeland. They have been indispensable for the growth of the journal and in fostering a resonant relationship between the research articles and the review sections. I am also grateful for the support I received from Taylor & Francis, especially staff at the Journal Editorial Office, and Production Manager Irene Legaspi. Finally, there is no better illustration of the amplification Sound Studies achieved within the discipline and the humanities more broadly than some key journal metrics, such as the average of 28K downloads/views per year. Or the recognition of key contributions such as Brian Kane’s article in the inaugural issue on “Sound studies without auditory culture” which has been viewed 13,208 times. No less impressive, Luis-Manuel Garcia’s “Beats, flesh, and grain” garnered 8,766 views.
Much remains to be done. Future issues of Sound Studies will see an even more diverse array of perspectives, methodologies, and subjects in areas such as indigenous studies, climate change, or AI. Hopefully, they will also feature more interventions from a wider spectrum of national, cultural, and professional backgrounds than has been the case in the past. Ideally, the Second Sound section – which sporadically featured short, sometimes impressionistic, work-in-progress, texts – will become a more permanent feature. Last but not least, the editorial board will be significantly enlarged over the coming volumes. Beginning with this issue it is my distinct pleasure to welcome Milena Droumeva and Jens Gerrit Papenburg to the team.
Milena is an Associate Professor of Communication and Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specialising in sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with attention to feminist and intersectional approaches to research. They have a background in acoustic ecology and work across the fields of urban soundscape research and city planning discourse, sonification for public engagement, as well as gender and sound in video games.
Jens is a Professor of Musicology/Sound Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. He is the author of Listening Devices. Music Media in the Pre-Digital Era (Bloomsbury 2023), co-editor of Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion (MIT Press 2016), and principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Syncopation and Volume: Sounding Out Sonic Modernity, 1890-1945.