This collection of 23 essays, arranged into seven thematic sections, encompasses a very wide range of approaches, including physiology, epistemology, electronics, theories of sensory perception, phenomenology, music, the history of technology, and medicine. It has a complementary website with sound samples, and each essay has a bibliography that, aggregated, is priceless. It is the most substantial of the proliferating publications devoted to sound studies, a field that, although described as ‘emerging’ in the blurb, is now nearly half a century old. In such a brief review of a 600-page book, I need to skip the minutiae to get to some very broad questions it raises. At this point in the evolution of sound studies, for example, the most incisive of these essays make it clear, sometimes only implicitly, that the various approaches to the field raise major issues of research methodology, but that these in turn have fundamental epistemological implications (see Bruyninckx on ornithological field recordings and Sterne and Akiyama on the phonautograph; both essays evoked for me Extended Mind Theory in questioning some fundamental distinctions that have become entrenched in intellectual enquiry, such as between mind and body, subjective and objective, cognitive and corporeal; see also Clark Reference Clark2008). The dominant schema of Western intellectual history is also challenged by an alternative trajectory of antinodes/nodes in which what I have called an ‘aural renaissance’ (see, for example, Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2009, p. 58) becomes a pivotal shift (see Supper on the sonification of scientific data and Fickers on the cultural ramifications of the radio dial).

Such enquiries evoke debates about the appropriate theoretical models for acoustic ecology (and popular music studies – PMS). In spite of the refreshing revisionism of Cultural Theory from the late 20th century, in the forms that became dominant it gradually revealed itself to be dependent on a more fundamental epistemology, rooted in the authority of the scopic. Rice's discussion of ‘stethoscopic perspectives’ dilates on the related problems of sonic discourse, also taken up in Supper's argument that the insistence on established scientific categories falls under the shadow of scopocentricity. She refers to the inauguration of the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) in 1992 which, I note, coincides with the foundation of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) in 1993. As an active and founder member of the latter I am dismayed that I had not known of the other body, and it is instructive to realise that formal communities were precipitating out of various disciplines more or less simultaneously, following similar but largely non-convergent paths.

This collection, along with related publications proliferating from the turn of this century, suggests that there seem to be at least two streams. Mine (and most of this readership's) flows out of PMS and sometimes through the foundational work in the 1960s of the World Soundscape Project, involving R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues including Hildegarde Westerkamp, and Barry Truax whose Handbook of Acoustic Ecology of 1978 was, I believe, the first of its kind. One of the earliest collections outside WSP was Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo, edited by Finnish scholar Helmi Järviluoma (Reference Järviluoma1994), and who, with Greg Wagstaff also published the book Soundscape Studies and their Methods (2002). Järviluoma has built on the foundations set down by the WSP and Schafer, including by revisiting and extending his original field locations to explore changes in the decades since the original WSP (see Järviluoma et al. 2009). Other prominent names in the convergence of music and sound studies include Tagg and Kassabian, both with specialisations in film sound and music. None of the foregoing names appears to be cited in this collection, apart from Schafer (albeit mis-spelled as Schaefer on p. 479) and Truax.

It is as though sound studies has a double tradition, but it is unclear how the two are distinguished. Perhaps music-centred and non-music-centred? Music-centred and noise-centred? Aesthetic and scientific? These separations are not of course absolute (a number of PMS writers are occasionally cited in this collection, but at certain points I wonder ‘If you are interested in this, why haven't you read X?’ If you are interested for example in sonic evocations of water (Helmreich, Chapter 6) why not look at Tagg on sonic affect and representations (for example Tagg and Clarida Reference Tagg and Clarida2003)? Of course it works both ways: Science and Technology Studies (STS – it is sufficiently defined as to have its own acronym), for example, would benefit from reading in PMS, but also vice versa. Even as a PM scholar based on sono-centricity rather than just aesthetics and cultural studies, my own ‘bibliography’ has been vastly increased by this volume. There is a connection between this multiple tradition and the issue of theoretical and disciplinary boundaries. In her critical analysis of attempts to define ‘sonification’, Supper reports ICAD's exclusion of ‘the humanities’ in general and music in particular from what it declares is an exclusively scientific enterprise (pp. 253, 254–5, 258, 260).

Yet the same territorialism afflicts neighbouring regions. Music researchers have often disdained scientific disciplines, perhaps fearing that rethinking music as a subject of scientific analysis (‘sound’ or even ‘noise’), forfeits the aesthetic gravitas that justifies their attentions, and preferring as a framework a version of cultural theory which is often oddly detached from the material world. Something of this may be sensed in an account of the ‘toxic’ corollaries of the iPod. Most attention is directed to the subjective consciousness end of the spectrum. One page in 17 refers to the massive social and economic problem of organic damage: irreversible deafness. And there is no reference at all to the increasing problem of road accidents or assaults consequent upon the victim's sonic self-absorption.

The dominant discourses of cultural theory, even when deployed in the study of sound, remain colonies in the empire of the visual. Some of the essays in this collection instructively engage with the question of appropriate discursive frames for acoustic studies. Perhaps one path forward is not in cultural theory but in industrial and commodity research projects like OBELICS, surveyed by Cleophas and Bijsterfeld. The conceptual models developed by commercial corporations really are interested in a practical engagement with social practices rather than establishing a lofty distance from them. An automobile manufacturer wants his business models to be intimately related to the ‘real world’ of social practice and consumer desire, unlike the cultural theorist whose agenda is likely to be intellectual foppery, a ‘display’ or ‘performance’. The social theorist who has no stake in extramural reality can find a place in academia, while the engineers in the corporate sector relentlessly sought to replicate the ‘real’ in developing their test models (see, for example, pp. 110–11).

Inevitably a collection as heterogeneous as this will be uneven. For the most part the historical range is from the mid-19th century to the present, the latter end accompanied by the occasional solipsistic presentism which is pervasive in popular culture/music studies. We are told that the convergence of hip hop and digitisation in the 1970s suddenly ‘allowed for many more public performances of music’ (p. 509). This claim ignores the rich history of street music, as documented by, for example, Picker (Reference Picker2003) and Smith (Reference Smith1999). Look at Hogarth's engraving ‘The Enraged Musician’, and study the history of attempts to censor street music and other noise back to Roman times. There were other prior forms of the electronically mediated public presentation of music including portable record players and of course the portable transistor radio from the 1950s (as documented in the next essay, by Bull). We are informed that hip hop is also notable for collaborations between artists and engineers (p. 510) – in fact an ancient convergence – and for racial empowerment (p. 512), a claim that could be made for developments of various kinds back to the late 19th century. The articles most deeply informed by a historical perspective or which turn our attention away from the Anglo/US comfort zone are often the most stimulating and instructive. The discussion of non-official music practices in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Hagen with Denora) refreshingly breaks out of the usual Manicheean discussions of censorship.

But overarching the specificity of the various case studies, the relationship between cultural theory and practice is among the larger issues raised by this collection, which are, or should be, on the PMS agenda. Both at this level, and at the level of detailed practical engagement with actual sonicity, this collection of case studies confirms the value of acoustic cultural history as a complement to the study of music. For me it is also a revelatory summary of how far sound studies has come, and the breadth of its cross-disciplinary compass. The collection demonstrates, often breathtakingly, the potential of sonocentric approaches to the understanding of cultural history.