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The Social Life of Sound

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Sophia Maalsen

    1. School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia

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  • Provides a new and innovative angle on the controversies and conflicts generated with the emergence of cultures and practices of music-making associated with new music-making technologies

  • Theoretically and conceptually innovative, being the first work that applies an object biography and life history approach to reused musical sounds

  • Enlists a broad range of illustrative examples of interest to musical scholars and music enthusiasts. This includes record collecting; beat making and sampling; curating music at both an institutional level (Smithsonian Folkways), independent label level, and in personal collections; and, reissuing records

  • Offers broad appeal to a diverse audience – both academic and those interested in music cultures more broadly

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Entroducing

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 1-17

  3. Theories and Methodology

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 19-58

  4. Not Just Rare but UBER RARE! Biography, Music, and Personhood in Yaraandoo

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 59-92

  5. Sampling Genealogies of Sound

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 93-141

  6. Sven Libaek and “Misty Canyon”

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 143-171

  7. Reissues: Collecting, Curating, Connoisseurship, and Cultural Mass

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 173-202

  8. Distributed Personhood and the Multiple Biography

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 203-232

  9. Conclusion: Somebodies as Multibiographical Sound

    • Sophia Maalsen
    Pages 233-246

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 247-267
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Keywords

About this book

The Social Life of Sounds argues for the agency of sounds and music and the acceleration of their social lives in the Digital Age. Drawing upon research with composers, producers, record collectors, DJs and record labels, the book problematises the notion of artistic authorship as it is framed in Western systems of property. Acknowledging that ‘things’ – sounds, samples, and recorded music – and people are co-constituted and that personhood is distributed through things and their reuse, Maalsen makes a case for understanding sound as multibiographical and challenges the possessive individual that is the basis of artistic copyright.

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia

    Sophia Maalsen

About the author

Sophia Maalsen is a lecturer in urbanism at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She specializes in the digital reconfiguration of the everyday across the fields of music, urbanism, material culture, housing and gender.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Social Life of Sound

  • Authors: Sophia Maalsen

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3453-5

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-3452-8Published: 05 February 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-3453-5Published: 28 January 2019

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XI, 267

  • Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Human Geography, Music, Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies

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