The Audible PastThe Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, by SterneJonathan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 472 pp. $69.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8223-3004-0. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8223-3013-X.: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction

Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music

Literature on sounds inside institutions has shown that sounds are indispensable to the working of hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutional environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three eldercare homes in Germany this article suggests that the more permanent care context of institutional homes for the elderly compared to a hospital setting is decisive for people’s interpretation of and engagement with sounds. This is true at multiple levels, such as “monitory listening,” the use of “music as a technology of self,” or sounds as a tool of care. In fact, in this long-term care context even silences prompt action. Based on their experience with individual residents, for example, caregivers can direct their monitory listening not only to existing sounds, but also to the silence of expected but absent sounds. Throughout the article, additional consideration is given to the role of the technologies that produce the sounds, showing how in their design and functioning they shape, complement or prevent people’s attention to sound and silence. Finally, I propose that research is needed that goes beyond an understanding of silence as a healing environment for the vulnerable and sick and instead attends to the complexity of this acoustic event within the context of eldercare homes.

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Caring through Sound and Silence: Technology and the Sound of Everyday Life in Homes for the Elderly

The acceptance of western piano music in Japan and the career of Takahiro Sonoda

From the piano pestilence to the phonograph solo : four case studies of musical expertise in the laboratory and on the city street

While scholars have drawn attention to the production of space through sound, there has been less attention given to the interchange between multiple co-existing environments. This paper examines h...

Jennifer C. Hsieh

Papers

Piano transductions: music, sound and noise in urban Taiwan