SoundEffects is a new international peer-reviewed journal on sound and sound experience, bringing together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience. The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, and sociology for a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound.
The call for abstracts for the first issue is currently out, focusing on the question of the epistemological potential of sound. How does sound provoke and influence the way in which we experience the world? How can we talk about the phenomenological, bodily experience that sound produces?
More than ever, everyday life is mediated by a multitude of digitized and mechanically reproduced sounds. In Michael Bull’s words: “Waking, walking, driving, working and even falling asleep are all done to music or some other acoustic accompaniment” (Bull, 2003). Never has urban life been noisier. Yet within philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic frameworks, the world is still mostly conceived of as a visual reality. Sound produces meaning in numerous ways, both through the phenomenological, bodily experience of sound and through emerging and changing discourses of cultural practice. Responding to this condition, contemporary sound research must reflect upon the various ways in which the world is experienced through sound.
