New Books in Sound Studies

• S1.E7. Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

  Bruce Springsteen was keenly aware and excited by the sounds of the CBGBs scene during the Seventies. With his own bands, the Boss performed in the same venues associated with punk rock and ultimately wrote songs for Patti Smith and the Ramones. Yet Springsteen’s sound has remained distinct from punk rock as it emanated from New York. In the seventh episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with Bruce Springsteen biographer Jim Cullen and Melissa Ziobro the head curator of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University about Springsteen’s complicated relationship with punk rock in 1970s New York. As an NJ native, the Boss was a so-called “Bridge-and-Tunnel-Boy” but that socio-cultural infrastructure worked both ways. By the end of the Seventies, Springsteen did not need to travel to New York to engage with the punk sound. Punk culture was traveling to Asbury Park, NJ.  Jim Cullen is a historian of American popular culture and has taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Brown, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was a longtime faculty member and History Department chair at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York before moving to the recently founded Greenwich Country Day School in 2020. Cullen is the author of multiple award-winning book books on music including Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Harper Collins, 1997). His latest book, Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Metropolitan Sound of the American Century (Rutgers University, 2023), compares the musical careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.  Melissa Ziobro is a Professor of Public History at Monmouth University where she is currently the Head Curator for the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music. Former editor of New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Ziobro is deeply committed to documenting New Jersey history with the broader context of the American story. She curated a traveling exhibition called Music America: Iconic Objects from America’s Music History which is now on display at the Grammy Museum in Mississippi and is expected to return to Monmouth University for the opening of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in Spring 2026.    Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

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• Simon Stjernholm, "Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)

  Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembrance of God) informs sensorial experiences of the divine, particularly intimate ones, while the discussion on meditating on Muhammad considers the bodily aspects of Prophet Muhammad, such as his saliva, urine, and sweat that influence mawlid literatures and ritual performance of them within Sufi communities like the Naqshbandi-Haqqanis. Though rituals emerging from embodied understandings of holy figures are not without some tension, as we learn throughout the book but especially during the discussion on graves. Here the interred bodies of Sufi saints are caught up in debates around the permissibility of shrine visitation, a topic that comes up amongst lectures given by Swedish Muslim leaders. Overall, then, through analysis of Danish and Swedish podcast materials, ritual practices, such as devotion to the Prophet Muhammad and Sufi saints, we understand more about the sonic and pious dimensions of Islam and the Muslim authorial voices and listening that shapes them. This book will be of interest to those who work on sound studies, material culture, Sufism and Islam in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

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• Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Pavitra Sundar eds., "Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice" (UC Press, 2023)

  Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023) introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. Thinking with an Accent won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2024 Rene Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection. Editors: Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

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• Colleen Renihan, John Spilker, and Trudi Wright eds., "Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)

  Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024) is a collected edition about Pedagogies of Care edited by Colleen Renihan, John Spilker-Beed, and Trudi Wright are experienced music history educators working in the United States and Canada. They have curated a collection of essays that explore what it means to prioritize care when teaching, interacting with students, developing course syllabi, and curricula. Far more than simply treating students with dignity and compassion, pedagogies of care can infiltrate every aspect of teaching and higher education by centering the interests of students, instructors, and the larger communities to which they belong. As the essays in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music. The premise of the book is that care-based approaches to pedagogy can facilitate the systemic transformation that remains both possible and necessary for musicology, other disciplines, and institutions of higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

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• Noise and Affect Theory

  Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems. Staring around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology and representation and rhetoric and identity, but what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does a life develop a kind of texture of feeling over time? Affect studies is field interested in these questions, interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but affect isn’t reducible to words. So, it’s easy to see why affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars.  Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

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