Recent decades have seen a growing interest in "sound studies", a field of study that addresses the role of the auditory in culture and society. Sound studies is best understood as encompassing a broad range of critical approaches to the study of sound, a category that is considered here in both its physical and cultural dimensions. The philosophical writing of R. Murray Schafer (1994) and Walter Ong (1967), as well as the theories of musicologist Jacques Attali (1985) on the political potential of noise, provided some of the most influential early work on sound studies. Since the 1990s, scholars such as Emily Thompson (2002), Douglas Kahn (1999), Brandon LaBelle (2010) and Michael Bull and Les Back (2003) have explored the relationship between sound, architecture and modernization as means of historicizing cultural moments and crises. Researchers on sound technologies and media, such as Jonathan Sterne (2003), Rick Altman (2004) and Jacob Smith (2008), have made similarly significant contributions to the field, exploring the cultural origins and development of sound technologies. Their influence has been felt in the form of the appearance of academic journals dedicated to this field, including Sound Studies, The Journal of Sonic Studies and Sound Effects. Despite the sheer variety of disciplines and scholars that loosely belong to sound studies, they are generally unified by their shared aim to disrupt the epistemological dominance of the visual in Western culture. Bull and Back, for instance, have recently called for a "democracy of the senses" in which "no sense is privileged in relation to its counterparts" (2003, 2). As scholars make this shift, sound should not so much be studied in isolation or to the exclusion of other senses, but as a means of reinvigorating our understanding of the ways in which all the senseshearing, but also touching and feelingoperate together as a whole. Contributions to sound studies come from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, history, visual studies, musicology, architecture, literary studies and, perhaps most significantly, geography, often simultaneously bringing together elements from more than one of these fields in surprising and productive ways. If the material properties of sound are elusive and ambiguous, as it is able to pass through borders and walls, so too are the boundaries of sound studies, making the field diverse and interdisciplinary in scope. This spatial metaphor finds its richest expression in the dialogue between sound studies and geography, an area of research has been pioneered by Susan Smith (1997), Ben Highmore (2002) and John Connell and Chris Gibson (2003). This work considers the ways that sound contributes to the production of space, thereby drawing attention to how, for instance, the sonic marks out and transforms the boundaries between public and private space.
