Acoustic Territories, Second Edition

[An] important text for anyone involved in any form of sound studies. * The Wire Magazine (joint-reviewed with Sound Art Revisited) * LaBelle, a sound artist and an academic, writes with a fluid brilliance about the way that sound interacts with the other elements of our experience with a kind of comprehension and comprehensiveness that can suggest Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media or Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command, resulting in a visionary tome linking history, subcultures and street art. It's not a book about music per se, but it's hard to imagine a reading of it not interacting creatively with anyone's thinking on musical practice and meaning. LaBelle has a kind of accepting overview that I can't help admiring. It's too easy to simply decry noise pollution or the behavioural engineering of public space without actually exploring what a specific event might mean (e.g., how sound is wrapped up in identity and issues of private and public space), but LaBelle has the ability to keep thinking where many others would just react. It's an ability that makes this one of the more stimulating reads of the year. * Point of Departure * Acoustic Territories takes account of contemporary urban space by listening to it ... From the underground to the sky, this groundbreaking book explores the sonorities of everyday life, identifies the major stakes and challenges, and leads us brilliantly towards an auditory paradigm of urban experience. -- Jean-Paul Thibaud, CNRS researcher at CRESSON, scientific coordinator of the International Ambiances Network (ambiances.net) LaBelle argues that everyday acoustic life has an unbounded, yet highly differentiated, nature which offers new interdisciplinary modes of thinking to contemporary questions of global inhabitation, relation and disruption. In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the expanding field of sonic research. -- Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London