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Hearing History: A Reader. Edited by Mark M. Smith. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Pp. xxii, 413. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-2583-X; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8203-2582-1.)
It is hardly surprising that the history of sound has been relatively overlooked in the social sciences, given that Americans are continually engaged with the visual. In the last ten years there has been important research in many fields, and much of it is reproduced in this reader. Mark M. Smith has compiled more than twenty articles that address the changing soundscapes of modern life, ranging from the classic theories (such as Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music [Minneapolis, 1985]) to the latest research on specific times and places (including Richard Cullen Rath's excellent How Early America Sounded, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2003). Each article has been expertly abridged so that these four hundred pages cover a lot of ground and sample many different approaches. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with theory, the second with case studies from Europe, and the...