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Analysing Sounds In: The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis

By: Christoph Maeder Edited by: Uwe Flick Pub. Date: 2013 Access Date: November 13, 2016 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: London Print ISBN: 9781446208984 Online ISBN: 9781446282243 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243 Print pages: 424-434

©2014 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Analysing Sounds

Whenever society happens there is sound. When people are talking, making music, being called by church bells, driving cars, using computers, or making love, they produce sounds and acoustic effects. At the same time they become embedded into a sonic environment, which ultimately transcends the single actors. Larger social structures like families, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, factories, harbors, airports, train stations, and finally villages and even whole cities constantly generate acoustic environments that people live in. This fact of a ubiquitous acoustic sphere simultaneously being produced by social action and surrounding that social action as a context has largely been ignored by qualitative research. Obviously there are some domains, like conversation analysis (Silverman, 1998; also see Toerien, Chapter 22, this volume) or the ethnography (see Gubrium and Holstein, Chapter 3, this volume) of communication (Keating, 2001) that bring into focus a particular aspect of the acoustic world, namely, speech. In their ethnographical study of the workplace, Karine Lan Hing Ting and Barbara Pentimalli (2009) refer to noise as an important and functional resource used by hearing, or overhearing, non-linguistic acoustics like noisy typing on the keyboard, the snapping of fingers, the clapping of hands, etc. They argue that becoming a member of the workforce in a call center is based on the capacity to recognize and interpret significant sounds of this kind within an environment, which is acoustically demanding due to the general noise level of such operations. But these acoustically aware approaches restrict their interest to sound as language and as a form of communication. In this realm the amount of literature is vast, and highly sophisticated methods for research are accessible. The same holds true for music, where ethnomusicology, starting from the oral tradition of music like folk songs passed on without the

use of notation (McLucas, 2011) and going up to a ‘Global Music Theory’ (Hijleh, 2012), covers the field.1 But if we take the acoustic environment, sonic effects, auditory cultures, and sound practice as topics each in their own right, the outlook changes. By mainly considering the non-linguistic and non-musical aspects of sound in society, we are challenged by a whole new field of study (Vannini et al., 2010). And this becomes even more apparent when we try to blend sound analysis with qualitative research.

Before I turn to the practice and the methods in what might turn out to become qualitative sound research, I introduce the development of some perceivable strands of research on sound: sound ecology, sonic experience, and sound culture. My purpose is to explain selected important concepts that might be new, or that might need some elucidation for those who are not familiar with the field of what today is only loosely captured in the term ‘sound studies.’

The Development of Sound Studies

Sound studies are obviously not yet a consolidated and fully established field of qualitative research in the social sciences. And there are knowing voices suggesting that sound studies may stay an emerging field for ever: ‘Perhaps sound study is doomed to a position on the margins of various fields of scholarship, whispering unobtrusively in the background while the main action occurs elsewhere’ (Hilmes, 2005: 249). At least a geographical and linguistic spread of sound studies is observable. For a long time it seemed that sound studies were only systematically available in English and French. But a German branch has now emerged around the University of Arts in Berlin (see Schulze, 2008). However, research on the audio-sphere, the acoustic environment, the soundscape and even sound culture as we know it today remains an often confusing composition of different disciplines and perspectives. Those involved neither share a common method or theory, nor systematically take notice of each other. For instance, studies in architecture (Blesser and Salter, 2007; Hedfors, 2008), cultural anthropology (Hammou, 2011), art (LaBelle, 2006), philosophy (Ihde, 2007), history (Sterne, 2003; Szendy, 2008), film and cinema science (Altman, 1992), sociology (Attali, 1985), and others have made important and valuable contributions to the undertaking of making sound in society a researchable matter. But the topics, theories, focuses, and objects that are studied vary widely. And the boundaries between these endeavors are often blurred and rather fuzzy.

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(a) (b) (c)

In order to identify key streams in the research on sound, I propose to arrange the existing sound studies, which have a potential for qualitative research into three bundles:

sound ecology and acoustic communication; sonic experience and sonic effects; and auditory culture and sound culture studies.

This yields an incomplete grid, of course, which omits some disciplines, and the classification cannot encompass all there is on sound and acoustics. But it does at least make some methodological sense, as we will see later on in the text. To a certain degree it funnels together what is being analysed. Exponents of bundle (a) try to analyse the sound itself, whereas proponents of (c) take on more of the context and practices in and out of which sounds emerge and which sounds in turn also create. And the mainly French approach of (b), with its idea of the sonic effect as a core concept, stands somewhere in the middle of (a) and (c). It does not offer a clear-cut and systematic link between the two, but nevertheless incorporates some ideas from each side.

Sound Ecology and Acoustic Communication

The work to make sound a topic in its own right in the social sciences goes back to Murray R. Schafer's ‘World

Soundscape Project’ in the 1970s.2 The essence of this research is published in Schafer's (1994) book Soundscape. Originally published in English in 1977, the book was not translated into French until 1991, and was only translated into German in 2010. The initial project at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver not only created a place where sound studies could be pursued at university level for presumably the first time, but also triggered the development of what is known today as the field of ‘acoustic communication’ (Truax, 2001), where, as well as the features of acoustic communication, the impact of technology on acoustic design by means of electro-acoustics is singled out as a dominant issue for research. Looking back, it is fair to say that everything to do with sound studies has been initiated, or at least has profited, in one way or another, from the groundbreaking work of Schafer and his group. In retrospect this approach can be labeled ‘sound ecology,’ because it looks at the phenomena of sounds in society in an encompassing and holistic way.

The key concept introduced by these studies is the term soundscape, by analogy to landscape:

The soundscape is any acoustic field of study. We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape. We can isolate an acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape. … A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen. (Schafer, 1994: 7f.)

Soundscapes as willfully extracted aspects of the human senses feature some special properties: Schafer (1994: 9) distinguishes keynote sounds, signals and soundmarks. Keynote sounds are the anchor or fundamental tone in a soundscape. They do not have to be listened to consciously, and they might even be overheard. As an example one might think of the keynote sounds of a shopping mall. There we are immersed in a complex blend of sounds composed of electronically distributed music, voices, footsteps, etc., which we do not analytically separate but take as the keynote of the situation. In an analogy to ethnomethodology (see Eberle, Chapter 13, this volume), where some quite complex features of understanding in everyday life go as ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 38–75), we can refer to the mundane keynote as the heard but unnoticed features of everyday life. And the keynote sounds of a given place are the background of a soundscape against which the signals can be perceived. Signals are foreground phenomena and they must be listened to consciously. Sound signals may be organized into quite elaborate codes, permitting messages to be transmitted to those who can understand them. Signals in the form of functional sounds are abundant in modern society. Think of all the sirens, warning bells, software sounds, elevator jingles, cashier rings,

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etc., to which we are exposed as functional sounds in everyday life. Some of these signals can turn out to become soundmarks:

The term soundmark is derived from landmark and refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique. (Schafer, 1994: 10)

Soundscapes can, furthermore, be split into lo-fi and hi-fi environments by looking at the signal-to-noise ratio. In sound studies a hi-fi environment is one in which sounds may be heard and perceived clearly by a listener, while a lo- fi environment has overcrowded and masked signals, and lacks clarity.

Besides the soundscape and its particular features, Schafer also developed an almost completely encompassing taxonomy of the first natural soundscape up to the post-industrial one. The two big changes for human lives and living, in this perspective, have been the introduction of the engine during the process of the Industrial Revolution and the mastery of electro-acoustics (radio, sound recording, the telephone, etc.). Since the olden days of the pre- industrial society, natural and rural soundscapes are receding for more and more of us and are being replaced by artificial, engineered acoustic environments. These changes are sometimes regarded as unfavorable, and hence

demand what is nowadays called acoustic ecology and noise reduction (Wrightson, 2000).3

The combined work of Schafer and his colleagues points toward an innovative and promising, though not easily applicable, perspective for qualitative research: innovative because they turn our attention to the acoustic dimension of society beyond mere communication; and promising because they have introduced new concepts like the

soundscape for the observation of our physical and social environment.4 But the endeavor remains very challenging due to its multidisciplinary way of thinking about the sonic sphere, and because some ‘non-compatible’ theorems of social theory are used.

Sonic Experience and Sonic Effects

Another approach, which judges that the soundscape is too wide and imprecise to let the researcher work at the scale of everyday practice and at the scale of urban spaces at the same time (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 7), has developed in France. At the National School of Architecture of Grenoble the philosopher, urban planner and musicologist Jean-François Augoyard founded the ‘Centre de recherche sur l'espace sonore et l'environnement urbain’ (CRESSON) in 1979. He and his co-workers focused on the effects of sound on listeners and hearers. They developed the concept of the ‘sonic effect’ in order to describe and analyse the experience of everyday sounds in architectural and urban contexts. In their pivotal publication, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Augoyard and Torgue defined 66 such effects and grouped them into 16 effects, which they defined as ‘basic … always existing in concrete space or in the listening process … effects that directly participate in the nature of the urban environment or in the cultural processes’ (2006: 15). An example given for such an effect is ‘Metamorphosis: A perceptive effect describing the unstable and changing relations between elements of a sound ensemble … the relation between elements that compose the sound environment, defined as addition and superimposition of multiple sources heard simultaneously’ (2006: 73). As an example for metamorphosis the reader might think of being in a soccer stadium during a game. There, all kinds of sounds (natural voices, electronically amplified voices, sounds of engines, and many more) mix in a continuous and complex way. For the hearer this blends into the sonic properties of this particular happening, which oscillate around different perceivable acoustic sources and finally blend into the joint and specific outcome that defines the acoustic dimension of the game. Because the sonic effect is seen as a multidisciplinary object by the authors themselves, the major effects are discussed in relation to the domains of:

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Psychology and physiology of perception Physical and applied acoustics Architecture and urbanism Sociology and everyday culture Musical and electro-acoustic aesthetics Textual and media expressions.

But even given such a clear structure, the sonic effect in this tradition should be understood as a paradigm rather than as a strictly defined concept of cause and effect. As the authors write:

Halfway between the universal and the singular, simultaneously model and guide, it allows a general discourse about sounds. … Rather than defining things in a closed way, it opens the field to a new class of phenomena by giving some indication of their nature and their status. Finally, it characterizes the modal or instrumental dimensions of sound. (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 9)

Put in a nutshell, the sonic effect bridges the gap between sound ecology (i.e., the concept of the soundscape as acoustic sensations that are just there and observable) and the phenomenology of sound as something linked to individual experience and social practice. But since these authors present the concept of sound effect as a complex array following its own logic, the link is somewhat obscure and incomplete.

The human ear as a sensory organ has some remarkable properties and capacities. Since there is no ‘ear lid,’ sounds once in the air must be heard. And this holds true over the 360 degrees around the receiving subjects. Our ears are permanently screening the acoustic environment, even when we would prefer them not to operate in such a manner. Think of yourself alone in a mountain hut where the wooden beams creak and crack in the wind. The effect of such a situation frightens us, and has been named ‘the uncivilized ear’ (‘l'oreille primitive’) by Pierre Schaeffer (1982). The fact that we are hearing nearly all the time makes it necessary to adapt our ears continuously to the acoustic environment. The adjustment of hearing sounds ‘in’ and ‘out’ consists of two parallel processes or effects (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 123f.). The processes are at the center of auditory perception and enable metamorphosis as described earlier. They are called synecdoche and asyndeton. The synecdoche effect is the aptitude to extract one specific audible element through selection. Selective listening is a fundamental competence in everyday practice and is complementary but antithetic to asyndeton, the selective deletion or ‘overhearing’ of sounds. These two effects of perceptive organization are the basis of any meaningful interpretation of the acoustic environment, because ‘they make it possible to create a gap between the physical sound of reference and the object of listening. In this sense, they are at the basis of the idea of sonic effect itself’ (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 174). The culture to which someone belongs thus has a central function in shaping the way they hear, evaluate, and valorize sounds and their capacity to do this. Schaeffer therefore introduced the term ‘l'objet sonore’ in France, as early as the late 1940s (Schaeffer, 1982, quoted in Schafer, 1994: 129), defining it as something from the audio-sphere which is chosen and experienced by one person but might be irrelevant for others. If we perceive the sonic environment as just a physical phenomenon, which can be recorded and displayed as waveforms, we obviously miss what sounds can and do mean to people, and how actors create social order by the use of sounds. This has already been clearly formulated in the acoustic communication approach:

Whether an environmental sound has a meaning or not (i.e., whether it is ‘just’ a noise) depends entirely on its context and how it is understood. The ‘sound object’ (an environmental sound isolated on tape from its context) cannot mean anything except itself as an aural sensation. (Truax, 2001: 53)

Auditory Culture and Sound Culture Studies

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New instrumental capacities have radically transformed the auditory world, and still do so. One such capacity is the electrical amplification and reproduction of sound by electromagnetic audio technologies. This makes it possible nowadays for sound – which was once attached to a discernible and original source – to flow everywhere. As a consequence, the hearing subject has to shape his or her ‘acoustic territories’ and even ‘acoustic identity’ (LaBelle, 2010) accordingly. Looked at in this way, the meaning of sounds in everyday life and sound-related practices become the cornerstones of auditory and sound culture studies (see Winter, Chapter 17, this volume). Whereas the auditory culture approach (see, e.g., Cox and Warner, 2004) focuses more or less on the consumption of and listening to music, sound culture studies do have a wider angle. An illuminative example of such an approach toward soundscapes, sound experience, and society is given by Michael Bull (2003). A social practice, the use of a car, is analysed with regard to the meanings that can be attached to the artifact, and it becomes comprehensible how ‘the historical turning point between “dwelling on the road” and “dwelling in the car” can be located in a very specific technological development:the placing of a radio within the automobile’ (Bull, 2003: 360). The car becomes an acoustic sanctuary where you can listen to what you want, as loud as you like, and even sing along with it. And

nobody will hear this, except, obviously, the driver.5 This privatized and exclusive acoustic situation in the car becomes a symbol of personal freedom shaped by technology and even infuses sense into the time spent in the car. But – and this is the critical part of the analysis – the individual is still embedded in, and controlled by, larger social structures, and might overestimate his or her individuality and freedom ‘by sound’ in the car. A further example of this kind is Bull's study on portable electronics, namely the iPod (Bull, 2007). I consider the Auditory Culture Reader of Bull and Back (2003) a major step forward for qualitative methods in the study of sounds in society. But the book is still structured to cover the acoustic social sphere of sounds in an encompassing way, similar to the sound ecology approach, because it is divided into ‘Thinking about Sound,’ ‘Histories of Sound,’ ‘Anthropologies of Sound,’ ‘Sounds in the City,’ and ‘Living and Thinking with Music.’ Given the year of publication and the pioneering character of the book, this should not be read as a criticism of the editors, but as a hint of where certain difficulties and challenges lie for the sound researcher. If we make the field too wide, it becomes difficult to develop a succinct approach.

A concise perspective has, however, been introduced in one of the latest efforts concerning sound and everyday life, where social places (the metro, the home, the sidewalk, the street, the shopping mall, the sky) as acoustic territories are systematically arranged as locales for acoustic practice:

To map out the features of this auditory paradigm, I have sought to explore in greater detail the particular behavior or figures of sound. It is my view that sonic materiality operates as ‘micro epistemologies,’ with the echo, the vibration, the rhythmic, for instance, opening up to specific ways of knowing the world. Accordingly, I have traced each chapter by following a particular sonic figure. For instance, in exploring the underground I tune in to the specific ways in which subterranean spaces are conditioned and bring forward the echoic … in this sense, the presentation of specific acoustic territories should not be exclusively read as places or sites but more as itineraries, as points of departure as well as arrival. As territories, I define them as movements between and among differing forces, full of multiplicity. (LaBelle, 2010: xxv)

Looked at in this way, the auditory life in, of, and as sound culture can be traced in the performative subtleties of everyday life. Such itineraries in acoustic territories imply a routinized knowledge of the competent actors who are interacting in and moving through the audio-sphere at the same time. Knowledge of this kind can be seen as a micro- epistemology of the mundane (see Eberle, Chapter 13, this volume) when it comes to the aural space: it allows society to function locally on proper acoustics and produces social phenomena transcending single social actions through embedding them into something bigger like a train system, a city, and so on. And such acoustic inserting includes the possibility of ‘overhearing by others’ (Goffman, 2010: 40) and of excluding someone from participation on the interactive level of society. Seen this way sounds and the acoustic environment resulting thereof function as a

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continuous indicator, a clue and a link from the micro-level of practice to the bigger levels of the social order. And this is happening in real time for the participants or hearers.

Last, but not least, there is the idea of sonic fieldwork and the creation of audio documentaries (Makagon and Neumann, 2009). It is correct to say that some of the most important archives of sound recordings have not come from scientists in the academy but from radio reporters, journalists, and other audiophiles (2009: 3–6, 9–14). The famous John Lomax Collection in the Library of Congress, which is available online today, is but one good example. The idea behind such collections was and still is to document and preserve the acoustic culture. The tokens in the collection do not follow any scientific logic or approach, but they represent what was remarkable for the collectors in those days. In this sense the collection is noteworthy in at least two ways: first, we can hear the historical sounds of a particular culture; and, second, we can discover what was considered a remarkable sound by those involved in recording. In the ever- and rapidly changing world we live in, audio documentaries can present and preserve the cultural richness and particularities of society in the audio-sphere.

Analysing Sounds: From Soundscapes to Sound Culture

Depending on the line of approach toward sound research taken by a scholar, he or she will use different data and varying concepts for the description and analysis of the relationship between social practice and the acoustic environment. As described in the previous part of this chapter, we can split the whole endeavor of sound studies, in an idealized manner, into those approaches that present sound and the corresponding analysis and those that focus on the sonic aspects of a social situation or social structures and embed them in everyday practice and culture.

The technology of digital sound recording available today makes it comparably easy to record sound. But suitable sound recording is quite challenging for many practical reasons. The practical aspects of sound recording or sonic documentation are interferences from wind, reverberations, echoes, distances, ephemerality of the sound objects, access problems, and many other disturbing factors. Wind, especially, is a constant source of trouble for the recording researcher. This is why high-level recording devices provide special windjammers. These are hairy hoods attached to the microphone lessening the sound of the wind. Anyone who seriously engages in sound recording in outside live settings will need a device like this. Echoes and reverberations are related to the topography of the space where the sound is recorded. There is no device which provides an easy cure to this except a good set of headphones plus test-driving with the recorder in ‘pre-hearing mode.’ This offers an opportunity to listen to the sound before it is stored on the recorder. While checking an acoustic environment in this mode, other nuisances like wind or strong foreground sounds overriding the targeted source will be heard. The recording system can then be configured accordingly. Basic digital recording is usually done on a device that can record formats (*.mp3, *.wma, *.wav, and others), which are suitable for storing and editing on the computer. Once recorded, elementary sound analysis concerned with the ‘pure’ aspects of sound can be applied: pitch, intensity, timbre, attack, duration, release, shape of the signal, etc., are the concepts used here (see Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 17). The matter can become quite technical and even sophisticated for the enthusiast. But for the average researcher the standard options offered by widely available recorders from manufacturers like Olympus, Marantz, Tascam, or Sony are already demanding enough and are usually more than adequate. These recorders are also called ‘pcm-recorders’ or ‘linear pcm recorders,’ where pcm stands for pulse-code modulation. The term ‘pcm’ refers to a method for encoding analog audio data into a digital format. One important thing to note about the machinery involved is that the standard devices for dictation or voice recording are targeted at specific levels of the human voice. This equipment will not work for most sound studies, since important portions of the sound environment get cut out. Therefore sound recording regularly begins by reading the manuals for technical gadgets in order to get the desired recording. It makes a good deal of sense to test out the whole process of setting up the systems, defining and finding the acoustic object, recording and transferring the object to the computer, and working on it before a serious research involvement is at hand. For those

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who really intend to go into serious recording, Makagon and Neumann (2009: 73–81) provide a useful guide on taping, microphones, recorders, headphones, and editing software.

Besides handling hard- and software, there is another question to think about before fieldwork starts: How much and what kind of information besides the electromagnetic oscillation on the recorder is needed? There is no simple answer to that question, since even sound-only research designs can vary remarkably. But because a sound object without a context cannot make very much sense in social research, the framework for the recording and the perspective for the analysis should be defined beforehand, or at the latest during the fieldwork. Here the famous phrase ‘the perceptual “something” is always in the middle of something else, it always forms a part of a “field”’ by Merleau-Ponty (1962: 4) applies, and might stand as a reminder and a warning against a purely positivistic approach to collecting data. In this regard Bauer and Gaskell (2000) offer helpful concepts for analysing sounds (noise and music) as social data.

Classical soundscape research usually records whole acoustic surroundings or environments (as, for instance, the World Soundscape Project did in Vancouver: see the section on sound ecology) at selected times, and presents selected exemplars of the sound objects and soundscapes in a rather artistic way. These recordings are finally documented on a CD and/or the Web and refer to a certain body of related text. Indeed the Web might turn out to become the appropriate medium in the future for the presentation of sound studies, which operate with recorded specimens of sounds. Whereas photographic data can be displayed in printed matter, and even video data can to a certain degree be presented in a similar manner, sound and print do not coexist as well. So we need some procedures to make sound visible. There are different options available for the display of sound in such studies, where plots of intensity (or amplitude) against time, or frequency against amplitude, or time against frequency are the best known. Such displays allow a quick visual distinction between lo-fi and hi-fi environments. But, as we have learnt, humans hear differently from machines due to their capacity of selective listening. So: ‘I want the reader to remain alert to the fact that all visual projections of sounds are arbitrary and fictitious’ (Schafer, 1994: 127; italics in the original). In principle, sounds can be classified according to their physical quality (acoustics), the hearer's perception of their effects (sound effect), their function and meaning (semiotics and semantics), and their emotional qualities (aesthetics). Thus a soundscape cannot be understood or analysed by dividing it up into single parameters of, let us say, acoustics. Having a soundscape is like having a book compared to having just the letters of an alphabet and some rules of the grammar, to use an analogy from linguistics. Single-sound events such as, for instance, the barking of a dog, the ringing of a church bell, or the blast of a foghorn, but not complete soundscapes, might be described and analysed according to their physical and their referential aspects. The physical aspects in soundscape studies are (Schafer, 1994: 134–7): distance, intensity in decibels, distinctness of hearing (distinctly, moderate distinctly, indistinctly), texture of ambiance (hi-fi, lo-fi, natural, human, technological), occurrence (isolated, repeated, part of a larger context), and environmental factors (no reverberation, short reverberation, long reverberation, echo, drift, displacement). The referential aspects of functions and the meanings of sounds can only be organized arbitrarily according to their empirical occurrence. A model of such a catalogue is presented in the ‘Tuning of the World’ (Schafer, 1994: 137–9). Finally comes the mapping of whole soundscapes. For this purpose so-called ‘sample sound notation systems,’ the isobel, and the sound event map (Schafer, 1994: appendix I), have been developed. An isobel map shows the distribution of the acoustic intensity within a landscape along lines of equal intensity. The picture produced looks very similar to the one produced by ordinary contour lines on a geographic map but holds different information. A sound event map reproduces the sound events at a certain location over time. But even with these techniques, the fundamental problem of hearing versus seeing remains unsolved. All that visualization work can – at its best – do is to soften the fact that sounds have to be heard and cannot be seen. The fact still holds true today: there is no best way to visualize sounds and soundscapes in sound studies.

The empirical steps of an analysis in the tradition of the sonic experience as exemplified by the sound effects

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proposed by Augoyard and Torgue (2006) cannot be further elaborated here. The matrix of the 66 effects, disciplines, and categories of sonic effects form a three-dimensional array of remarkable complexity. This matrix is not intended as a manual or guideline, which has to be used in its entirety in each analysis. The 16 main effects described, or even a combination thereof, can be used for research in and on acoustic settings. But the variance of the internal construction of the effects and hence the corresponding empirical approach derived from them (sound and video recording, see Knoblauch et al., Chapter 30; interview, see Roulston, Chapter 20; and participant observation, see Marvasti, Chapter 24, this volume), plus their interrelatedness, make it necessary for the interested researcher to consult the list and then to consider what to register and to analyse.

If we finally leave the presentation and analysis of recorded sound and engage in participant observation, interviews, documents, and even movies or television broadcasts as data, we are approaching the level of sound practice and sound culture studies by means of ethnography. Here it is not primarily the sound itself which comes under scrutiny, but the social practices which produce or refer to sound, a soundscape, or an acoustic environment. A study worth reading in this realm is that by Panayotis Panopoulos (2003). He analyses the meanings and functions of animal bells with regard to gender, families, reputations, and economy in a pastoral culture. Although some romanticism of the kind of à la recherche du temps perdu in the study cannot be ignored, the text demonstrates in an exemplary and

stunning way how sound, artifacts, and culture are interwoven phenomena.6 One of the few sociological contributions using ethnography with a focus on sound is Daniel Lee's study on barbershop quartet singing (2005). He deals with the important question of the distinction between noise and music, and he shows how vocal noise can be turned into music in a complex way and only in a particular culturally embedded context. But sound practice can become even more complex than singing, which is already not simple. If we take the techno-sphere as a medium for sound production and reproduction, as Steve Wurtzler (1992) does in his study ‘“She sang live, but the microphone was turned off”: The live, the recorded and the subject of representation,’ we become aware of how intertwined culture and sound and the corresponding analysis can become. This brings us to the dark side of sounds, where sonic warfare (Goodman, 2010) is addressed. Sound can also be deployed to produce fear and dread. The sonic dimensions of conflict are old, and the militarization of sound has a long history from antiquity up to the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay by very loud rock music. So it does not come as a surprise that sonic force and sonic power can be topics for sound research too. And finally we should not overlook the fact that when we turn our computers on we receive a sound logo. This is not only a functional sound, providing information on the status of the technical system, but also, as a logo, a symbolic part of our economies. So it is no longer a surprise that the German car maker Audi tunes not only the sound of the engine-which many other car makers do too – but also the sound of the doors and

even the whole company by the use of a concept of sound as its own Klangsprache (= language of sounds).7

Concluding Remarks

Sound studies challenge qualitative research in different ways. First, the ear as an important human sense has largely been ignored in comparison to the eye. There has not yet been an effort to conceptualize an analytic apparatus comparable to that for vision (e.g., Knoblauch and Schnettler, 2009; also see Knoblauch et al., Chapter 30, this volume). Hence the field of sound studies remains rather exotic and unfamiliar to the qualitative researcher. Second, qualitative research has also largely ignored any theoretical study of the acoustic environment except speech or music. Thus it remains unclear if there will ever be qualitative research that takes the sonic environment into consideration and transcends the language-focused and visual-oriented mainstream of current qualitative social research. However, the sound culture studies might have opened a promising route: they showed how the tunes of the world are analytically transformed into the sounds in and of society.

Notes

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1 . T h e p u b l i s h e r A s h g a t e d e v o t e s a s p e c i a l e d i t i o n t o t h e t o p i c o f e t h n o m u s i c o l o g y . S e e : http://www.ashgate.com/music (accessed 15 May 2013).

2. An informative description of the project and even some audio samples are available at the website: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html (accessed 15 May 2013).

3. See the website of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology: http://wfae.proscenia.net/about/index.html (accessed 15 May 2013).

4. The concept of the soundscape appears to be very attractive, but it is also contested and often misunderstood (Kelman, 2010).

5. One of the reviewers of this text remarked, ‘if you think loud car sound systems are limited to the inside of the car, you don't live in a big urban city, with “Boombox” culture!’ This is certainly true, and I do not want to overstretch my argument. But the sound of ‘Boomboxes’ obviously exactly constitutes a particular urban space for those involved.

6. An inspiring impression of how anthropology approaches sounds was actually the program for a conference on ‘Milieux Sonores (MILSON)’ held in Paris in 2011. The link is: http://milson.fr/je2011/ (accessed 15 May 2013).

7 . S e e https://www.audi- mediaservices.com/publish/ms/content/de/public/pressemitteilungen/2010/08/23/sound_satt__wie_klingt.standard.gid- oeffentlichkeit.html (accessed 15 May 2013).