The Future of Sound Studies (special issue of the journal Music, Sound, and
the Moving Image)

Editors: Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda

In his introduction to a 1999 special issue of iris dedicated to ‘The State
of Sound Studies’, Rick Altman announced that the academic study of sound
is ‘A Field Whose Time Has Come.’ Michele Hilmes, however, recently
speculated that ‘the study of sound, hailed as an “emerging field” for the
last hundred years, exhibits a strong tendency to remain that way, always
emerging, never emerged.’ Although a good deal of scholarly work on sound
has emerged over the past few years, traversing several academic fields
(film sound, radio, audio technology, cultural analysis of sound, music
studies), the current state of sound studies, as Jonathan Sterne asserts,
‘remains conceptually fragmented.’

This special issue of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image proposes to take
up the challenge of delineating the future of sound studies by inviting
papers that not only pursue the theory and history of sound as an object of
study but also aim to articulate cross-disciplinary methodologies and
analytical approaches. We are particularly interested in essays that
address such topics as: the relationship between film sound studies and
sound studies; defining “sound culture studies” and the shift to cultural
contexts; the formal and aesthetic dimensions of sound; the
medium-specificity thesis and disciplinary boundaries; theorising a history
of listening and subjectivity; reassessing the role of sound in film
theory. For this special issue of MSMI, the editors seek two types of
submissions: full length essays (approximately 7500 words) and short
position papers (1000-1500 words). The revised deadline for these
submissions is 1 June 2008.

Please send queries to:
Jay Beck: jbeck4_at_depaul.edu; and Tony Grajeda: agrajeda_at_pegasus.cc.ucf.edu

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image is the first international scholarly
journal devoted to the study of the interaction between music and sound
with the entirety of moving image media â€" film, television, music video,
advertising, computer games, mixed-media installation, digital art, VJ-ing,
et alia. Published by Liverpool University Press and co-edited by Anahid
Kassabian (University of Liverpool) and Ian Gardiner (Goldsmiths,
University of London), the journal is intended to be truly
interdisciplinary, inviting contributions from across a range of critical
methodologies, to include musicology and music analysis, film studies,
popular music studies, cultural theory, aesthetics, sociology, marketing,
sound studies, and music psychology. It is hoped that the journal will
provide an important focus for the similarly diverse and expanding
community of media music scholars

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to: Music, Sound, and the
Moving Image, School of Music, University of Liverpool, 80 Bedford Road
South, Liverpool L69 7WW, or email: journal_at_liv.ac.uk

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Received on Wed Jan 30 2008 - 18:14:36 EST