Abstract
Phonography and radio broadcasting enabled a highly significant socio-spatial shift, moving music listening from concert hall, theatre and music hall to the intimacies of the domestic environment. The manifold consequences of this transformation are a key focus of this edited collection. In attending to social mediation of music, the book seeks to develop a critical social phenomenology of music and sound, relating this to the ways in which social and power relations are manifested in historically and culturally specific ways. A long introduction by Georgina Born outlines the main conceptual strands that run through the book. The most central of these is ‘the capacity of music and sound, through their social and technological mediation, both to produce or initiate and reconfigure public and private experience’ (p. 24). The modalities of such production and reconfiguration are multiple, as are the forms of sociality and subjectivity associated with them. The four sections of the book focus on the design of the materiality of mediated music and sound; the deployment of sound and music in everyday lifeworlds and the shifting boundaries between private and public experience; the role of music, sound and space in animating the politics of identity and musical socialities; and finally, the uses of music and sound either to heal (Tia DeNora on community music therapy) or torture (Suzanne G. Cusick on the brutal use of loud music and noise as an interrogation strategy in the ‘global war on terror’). The topics dealt with are wide-ranging, as for instance with Eric Clarke on the capacity of music to specify motion and space, Jonathan Sterne on the MP4 format, Nicola Dibben and Anneli B. Haake on music in office workplaces, Tom Rice on everyday soundscapes in hospitals and Richard Middleton on the fidelity of the phonographic voice. This is an important collection, making a significant contribution to music and sound studies as well as carrying a wide array of resonances into other academic fields and disciplines.