Analysing SoundsIn The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data An.docx

Analysing Sounds
In: The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis
By: Christoph Maeder
Edited by: Uwe Flick
Pub. Date: 2013
Access Date: November 13, 2016
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9781446208984
Online ISBN: 9781446282243
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243
Print pages: 424-434
©2014 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods.
Please note that the pagination of the online version
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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243
Analysing Sounds
Whenever society happens there is sound. When people are
talking, making music, being called by church bells,
driving cars, using computers, or making love, they produce
sounds and acoustic effects. At the same time they
become embedded into a sonic environment, which ultimately
transcends the single actors. Larger social structures
like families, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, factories,
harbors, airports, train stations, and finally villages and

even whole cities constantly generate acoustic environments
that people live in. This fact of a ubiquitous acoustic
sphere simultaneously being produced by social action and
surrounding that social action as a context has largely
been ignored by qualitative research. Obviously there are some
domains, like conversation analysis (Silverman, 1998;
also see Toerien, Chapter 22, this volume) or the ethnography
(see Gubrium and Holstein, Chapter 3, this volume) of
communication (Keating, 2001) that bring into focus a
particular aspect of the acoustic world, namely, speech. In their
ethnographical study of the workplace, Karine Lan Hing Ting
and Barbara Pentimalli (2009) refer to noise as an
important and functional resource used by hearing, or
overhearing, non-linguistic acoustics like noisy typing on the
keyboard, the snapping of fingers, the clapping of hands, etc.
They argue that becoming a member of the workforce
in a call center is based on the capacity to recognize and
interpret significant sounds of this kind within an
environment, which is acoustically demanding due to the
general noise level of such operations. But these
acoustically aware approaches restrict their interest to sound as
language and as a form of communication. In this
realm the amount of literature is vast, and highly sophisticated
methods for research are accessible. The same holds
true for music, where ethnomusicology, starting from the oral
tradition of music like folk songs passed on without the
use of notation (McLucas, 2011) and going up to a ‘Global
Music Theory’ (Hijleh, 2012), covers the field.1 But if we
take the acoustic environment, sonic effects, auditory cultures,
and sound practice as topics each in their own right,
the outlook changes. By mainly considering the non-linguistic
and non-musical aspects of sound in society, we are
challenged by a whole new field of study (Vannini et al., 2010).
And this becomes even more apparent when we try to
blend sound analysis with qualitative research.

Before I turn to the practice and the methods in what might turn
out to become qualitative sound research, I introduce
the development of some perceivable strands of research on
sound: sound ecology, sonic experience, and sound
culture. My purpose is to explain selected important concepts
that might be new, or that might need some elucidation
for those who are not familiar with the field of what today is
only loosely captured in the term ‘sound studies.’
The Development of Sound Studies
Sound studies are obviously not yet a consolidated and fully
established field of qualitative research in the social
sciences. And there are knowing voices suggesting that sound
studies may stay an emerging field for ever: ‘Perhaps
sound study is doomed to a position on the margins of various
fields of scholarship, whispering unobtrusively in the
background while the main action occurs elsewhere’ (Hilmes,
2005: 249). At least a geographical and linguistic spread
of sound studies is observable. For a long time it seemed that
sound studies were only systematically available in
English and French. But a German branch has now emerged
around the University of Arts in Berlin (see Schulze,
2008). However, research on the audio-sphere, the acoustic
environment, the soundscape and even sound culture as
we know it today remains an often confusing composition of
different disciplines and perspectives. Those involved
neither share a common method or theory, nor systematically
take notice of each other. For instance, studies in
architecture (Blesser and Salter, 2007; Hedfors, 2008), cultural
anthropology (Hammou, 2011), art (LaBelle, 2006),
philosophy (Ihde, 2007), history (Sterne, 2003; Szendy, 2008),
film and cinema science (Altman, 1992), sociology
(Attali, 1985), and others have made important and valuable
contributions to the undertaking of making sound in

society a researchable matter. But the topics, theories, focuses,
and objects that are studied vary widely. And the
boundaries between these endeavors are often blurred and rather
fuzzy.
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(a)
(b)
(c)
In order to identify key streams in the research on sound, I
propose to arrange the existing sound studies, which have
a potential for qualitative research into three bundles:
sound ecology and acoustic communication;
sonic experience and sonic effects; and
auditory culture and sound culture studies.
This yields an incomplete grid, of course, which omits some
disciplines, and the classification cannot encompass all
there is on sound and acoustics. But it does at least make some
methodological sense, as we will see later on in the
text. To a certain degree it funnels together what is being
analysed. Exponents of bundle (a) try to analyse the sound
itself, whereas proponents of (c) take on more of the context
and practices in and out of which sounds emerge and

which sounds in turn also create. And the mainly French
approach of (b), with its idea of the sonic effect as a core
concept, stands somewhere in the middle of (a) and (c). It does
not offer a clear-cut and systematic link between the
two, but nevertheless incorporates some ideas from each side.
Sound Ecology and Acoustic Communication
The work to make sound a topic in its own right in the social
sciences goes back to Murray R. Schafer's ‘World
Soundscape Project’ in the 1970s.2 The essence of this research
is published in Schafer's (1994) book Soundscape.
Originally published in English in 1977, the book was not
translated into French until 1991, and was only translated
into German in 2010. The initial project at the Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver not only created a place where
sound studies could be pursued at university level for
presumably the first time, but also triggered the development of
what is known today as the field of ‘acoustic communication’
(Truax, 2001), where, as well as the features of acoustic
communication, the impact of technology on acoustic design by
means of electro-acoustics is singled out as a
dominant issue for research. Looking back, it is fair to say that
everything to do with sound studies has been initiated,
or at least has profited, in one way or another, from the
groundbreaking work of Schafer and his group. In retrospect
this approach can be labeled ‘sound ecology,’ because it looks
at the phenomena of sounds in society in an
encompassing and holistic way.
The key concept introduced by these studies is the term
soundscape, by analogy to landscape:
The soundscape is any acoustic field of study. We may speak of
a musical composition as a soundscape, or

a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as
a soundscape. We can isolate an acoustic
environment as a field of study just as we can study the
characteristics of a given landscape. … A
soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen. (Schafer,
1994: 7f.)
Soundscapes as willfully extracted aspects of the human senses
feature some special properties: Schafer (1994: 9)
distinguishes keynote sounds, signals and soundmarks. Keynote
sounds are the anchor or fundamental tone in a
soundscape. They do not have to be listened to consciously, and
they might even be overheard. As an example one
might think of the keynote sounds of a shopping mall. There we
are immersed in a complex blend of sounds
composed of electronically distributed music, voices, footsteps,
etc., which we do not analytically separate but take as
the keynote of the situation. In an analogy to ethnomethodology
(see Eberle, Chapter 13, this volume), where some
quite complex features of understanding in everyday life go as
‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 38–75), we can
refer to the mundane keynote as the heard but unnoticed
features of everyday life. And the keynote sounds of a given
place are the background of a soundscape against which the
signals can be perceived. Signals are foreground
phenomena and they must be listened to consciously. Sound
signals may be organized into quite elaborate codes,
permitting messages to be transmitted to those who can
understand them. Signals in the form of functional sounds
are abundant in modern society. Think of all the sirens, warning
bells, software sounds, elevator jingles, cashier rings,

etc., to which we are exposed as functional sounds in everyday
life. Some of these signals can turn out to become
soundmarks:
The term soundmark is derived from landmark and refers to a
community sound which is unique or
possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed
by the people in that community. Once a
soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for
soundmarks make the acoustic life of the
community unique. (Schafer, 1994: 10)
Soundscapes can, furthermore, be split into lo-fi and hi-fi
environments by looking at the signal-to-noise ratio. In
sound studies a hi-fi environment is one in which sounds may
be heard and perceived clearly by a listener, while a lo-
fi environment has overcrowded and masked signals, and lacks
clarity.
Besides the soundscape and its particular features, Schafer also
developed an almost completely encompassing
taxonomy of the first natural soundscape up to the post-
industrial one. The two big changes for human lives and
living, in this perspective, have been the introduction of the
engine during the process of the Industrial Revolution and
the mastery of electro-acoustics (radio, sound recording, the
telephone, etc.). Since the olden days of the pre-
industrial society, natural and rural soundscapes are receding
for more and more of us and are being replaced by
artificial, engineered acoustic environments. These changes are
sometimes regarded as unfavorable, and hence

demand what is nowadays called acoustic ecology and noise
reduction (Wrightson, 2000).3
The combined work of Schafer and his colleagues points toward
an innovative and promising, though not easily
applicable, perspective for qualitative research: innovative
because they turn our attention to the acoustic dimension
of society beyond mere communication; and promising because
they have introduced new concepts like the
soundscape for the observation of our physical and social
environment.4 But the endeavor remains very challenging
due to its multidisciplinary way of thinking about the sonic
sphere, and because some ‘non-compatible’ theorems of
social theory are used.
Sonic Experience and Sonic Effects
Another approach, which judges that the soundscape is too wide
and imprecise to let the researcher work at the scale
of everyday practice and at the scale of urban spaces at the
same time (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006: 7), has
developed in France. At the National School of Architecture of
Grenoble the philosopher, urban planner and
musicologist Jean-François Augoyard founded the ‘Centre de
recherche sur l'espace sonore et l'environnement
urbain’ (CRESSON) in 1979. He and his co-workers focused on
the effects of sound on listeners and hearers. They
developed the concept of the ‘sonic effect’ in order to describe
and analyse the experience of everyday sounds in
architectural and urban contexts. In their pivotal publication,
Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds,
Augoyard and Torgue defined 66 such effects and grouped them
into 16 effects, which they defined as ‘basic …
always existing in concrete space or in the listening process …

effects that directly participate in the nature of the
urban environment or in the cultural processes’ (2006: 15). An
example given for such an effect is ‘Metamorphosis: A
perceptive effect describing the unstable and changing relations
between elements of a sound ensemble … the
relation between elements that compose the sound environment,
defined as addition and superimposition of multiple
sources heard simultaneously’ (2006: 73). As an example for
metamorphosis the reader might think of being in a
soccer stadium during a game. There, all kinds of sounds
(natural voices, electronically amplified voices, sounds of
engines, and many more) mix in a continuous and complex way.
For the hearer this blends into the sonic properties of
this particular happening, which oscillate around different
perceivable acoustic sources and finally blend into the joint
and specific outcome that defines the acoustic dimension of the
game. Because the sonic effect is seen as a
multidisciplinary object by the authors themselves, the major
effects are discussed in relation to the domains of:
Psychology and physiology of perception
Physical and applied acoustics
Architecture and urbanism
Sociology and everyday culture
Musical and electro-acoustic aesthetics
Textual and media expressions.
But even given such a clear structure, the sonic effect in this
tradition should be understood as a paradigm rather

than as a strictly defined concept of cause and effect. As the
authors write:
Halfway between the universal and the singular, simultaneously
model and guide, it allows a general
discourse about sounds. … Rather than defining things in a
closed way, it opens the field to a new class of
phenomena by giving some indication of their nature and their
status. Finally, it characterizes the modal or
instrumental dimensions of sound. (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006:
9)
Put in a nutshell, the sonic effect bridges the gap between sound
ecology (i.e., the concept of the soundscape as
acoustic sensations that are just there and observable) and the
phenomenology of sound as something linked to
individual experience and social practice. But since these
authors present the concept of sound effect as a complex
array following its own logic, the link is somewhat obscure and
incomplete.
The human ear as a sensory organ has some remarkable
properties and capacities. Since there is no ‘ear lid,’ sounds
once in the air must be heard. And this holds true over the 360
degrees around the receiving subjects. Our ears are
permanently screening the acoustic environment, even when we
would prefer them not to operate in such a manner.
Think of yourself alone in a mountain hut where the wooden
beams creak and crack in the wind. The effect of such a
situation frightens us, and has been named ‘the uncivilized ear’
(‘l'oreille primitive’) by Pierre Schaeffer (1982). The
fact that we are hearing nearly all the time makes it necessary to
adapt our ears continuously to the acoustic
environment. The adjustment of hearing sounds ‘in’ and ‘out’
consists of two parallel processes or effects (Augoyard
and Torgue, 2006: 123f.). The processes are at the center of

auditory perception and enable metamorphosis as
described earlier. They are called synecdoche and asyndeton.
The synecdoche effect is the aptitude to extract one
specific audible element through selection. Selective listening is
a fundamental competence in everyday practice and
is complementary but antithetic to asyndeton, the selective
deletion or ‘overhearing’ of sounds. These two effects of
perceptive organization are the basis of any meaningful
interpretation of the acoustic environment, because ‘they
make it possible to create a gap between the physical sound of
reference and the object of listening. In this sense,
they are at the basis of the idea of sonic effect itself’ (Augoyard
and Torgue, 2006: 174). The culture to which someone
belongs thus has a central function in shaping the way they
hear, evaluate, and valorize sounds and their capacity to
do this. Schaeffer therefore introduced the term ‘l'objet sonore’
in France, as early as the late 1940s (Schaeffer, 1982,
quoted in Schafer, 1994: 129), defining it as something from the
audio-sphere which is chosen and experienced by
one person but might be irrelevant for others. If we perceive the
sonic environment as just a physical phenomenon,
which can be recorded and displayed as waveforms, we
obviously miss what sounds can and do mean to people, and
how actors create social order by the use of sounds. This has
already been clearly formulated in the acoustic
communication approach:
Whether an environmental sound has a meaning or not (i.e.,
whether it is ‘just’ a noise) depends entirely on its context
and how it is understood. The ‘sound object’ (an environmental
sound isolated on tape from its context) cannot mean
anything except itself as an aural sensation. (Truax, 2001: 53)
Auditory Culture and Sound Culture Studies

New instrumental capacities have radically transformed the
auditory world, and still do so. One such capacity is the
electrical amplification and reproduction of sound by
electromagnetic audio technologies. This makes it possible
nowadays for sound – which was once attached to a discernible
and original source – to flow everywhere. As a
consequence, the hearing subject has to shape his or her
‘acoustic territories’ and even ‘acoustic identity’ (LaBelle,
2010) accordingly. Looked at in this way, the meaning of
sounds in everyday life and sound-related practices become
the cornerstones of auditory and sound culture studies (see
Winter, Chapter 17, this volume). Whereas the auditory
culture approach (see, e.g., Cox and Warner, 2004) focuses
more or less on the consumption of and listening to
music, sound culture studies do have a wider angle. An
illuminative example of such an approach toward
soundscapes, sound experience, and society is given by Michael
Bull (2003). A social practice, the use of a car, is
analysed with regard to the meanings that can be attached to the
artifact, and it becomes comprehensible how ‘the
historical turning point between “dwelling on the road” and
“dwelling in the car” can be located in a very specific
technological development:the placing of a radio within the
automobile’ (Bull, 2003: 360). The car becomes an
acoustic sanctuary where you can listen to what you want, as
loud as you like, and even sing along with it. And
nobody will hear this, except, obviously, the driver.5 This
privatized and exclusive acoustic situation in the car
becomes a symbol of personal freedom shaped by technology

and even infuses sense into the time spent in the car.
But – and this is the critical part of the analysis – the individual
is still embedded in, and controlled by, larger social
structures, and might overestimate his or her individuality and
freedom ‘by sound’ in the car. A further example of this
kind is Bull's study on portable electronics, namely the iPod
(Bull, 2007). I consider the Auditory Culture Reader of
Bull and Back (2003) a major step forward for qualitative
methods in the study of sounds in society. But the book is
still structured to cover the acoustic social sphere of sounds in
an encompassing way, similar to the sound ecology
approach, because it is divided into ‘Thinking about Sound,’
‘Histories of Sound,’ ‘Anthropologies of Sound,’ ‘Sounds
in the City,’ and ‘Living and Thinking with Music.’ Given the
year of publication and the pioneering character of the
book, this should not be read as a criticism of the editors, but as
a hint of where certain difficulties and challenges lie
for the sound researcher. If we make the field too wide, it
becomes difficult to develop a succinct approach.
A concise perspective has, however, been introduced in one of
the latest efforts concerning sound and everyday life,
where social places (the metro, the home, the sidewalk, the
street, the shopping mall, the sky) as acoustic territories
are systematically arranged as locales for acoustic practice:
To map out the features of this auditory paradigm, I have sought
to explore in greater detail the particular
behavior or figures of sound. It is my view that sonic
materiality operates as ‘micro epistemologies,’ with the
echo, the vibration, the rhythmic, for instance, opening up to
specific ways of knowing the world. Accordingly,
I have traced each chapter by following a particular sonic
figure. For instance, in exploring the underground I
tune in to the specific ways in which subterranean spaces are
conditioned and bring forward the echoic … in

this sense, the presentation of specific acoustic territories
should not be exclusively read as places or sites
but more as itineraries, as points of departure as well as arrival.
As territories, I define them as movements
between and among differing forces, full of multiplicity.
(LaBelle, 2010: xxv)
Looked at in this way, the auditory life in, of, and as sound
culture can be traced in the performative subtleties of
everyday life. Such itineraries in acoustic territories imply a
routinized knowledge of the competent actors who are
interacting in and moving through the audio-sphere at the same
time. Knowledge of this kind can be seen as a micro-
epistemology of the mundane (see Eberle, Chapter 13, this
volume) when it comes to the aural space: it allows
society to function locally on proper acoustics and produces
social phenomena transcending single social actions
through embedding them into something bigger like a train
system, a city, and so on. And such acoustic inserting
includes the possibility of ‘overhearing by others’ (Goffman,
2010: 40) and of excluding someone from participation on
the interactive level of society. Seen this way sounds and the
acoustic environment resulting thereof function as a
continuous indicator, a clue and a link from the micro-level of

practice to the bigger levels of the social order. And this
is happening in real time for the participants or hearers.
Last, but not least, there is the idea of sonic fieldwork and the
creation of audio documentaries (Makagon and
Neumann, 2009). It is correct to say that some of the most
important archives of sound recordings have not come from
scientists in the academy but from radio reporters, journalists,
and other audiophiles (2009: 3–6, 9–14). The famous
John Lomax Collection in the Library of Congress, which is
available online today, is but one good example. The idea
behind such collections was and still is to document and
preserve the acoustic culture. The tokens in the collection do
not follow any scientific logic or approach, but they represent
what was remarkable for the collectors in those days. In
this sense the collection is noteworthy in at least two ways:
first, we can hear the historical sounds of a particular
culture; and, second, we can discover what was considered a
remarkable sound by those involved in recording. In the
ever- and rapidly changing world we live in, audio
documentaries can present and preserve the cultural richness
and
particularities of society in the audio-sphere.
Analysing Sounds: From Soundscapes to Sound Culture
Depending on the line of approach toward sound research taken
by a scholar, he or she will use different data and
varying concepts for the description and analysis of the
relationship between social practice and the acoustic
environment. As described in the previous part of this chapter,
we can split the whole endeavor of sound studies, in
an idealized manner, into those approaches that present sound
and the corresponding analysis and those that focus
on the sonic aspects of a social situation or social structures and
embed them in everyday practice and culture.

The technology of digital sound recording available today
makes it comparably easy to record sound. But suitable
sound recording is quite challenging for many practical reasons.
The practical aspects of sound recording or sonic
documentation are interferences from wind, reverberations,
echoes, distances, ephemerality of the sound objects,
access problems, and many other disturbing factors. Wind,
especially, is a constant source of trouble for the
recording researcher. This is why high-level recording devices
provide special windjammers. These are hairy hoods
attached to the microphone lessening the sound of the wind.
Anyone who seriously engages in sound recording in
outside live settings will need a device like this. Echoes and
reverberations are related to the topography of the space
where the sound is recorded. There is no device which provides
an easy cure to this except a good set of headphones
plus test-driving with the recorder in ‘pre-hearing mode.’ This
offers an opportunity to listen to the sound before it is
stored on the recorder. While checking an acoustic environment
in this mode, other nuisances like wind or strong
foreground sounds overriding the targeted source will be heard.
The recording system can then be configured
accordingly. Basic digital recording is usually done on a device
that can record formats (*.mp3, *.wma, *.wav, and
others), which are suitable for storing and editing on the
computer. Once recorded, elementary sound analysis
concerned with the ‘pure’ aspects of sound can be applied:
pitch, intensity, timbre, attack, duration, release, shape of
the signal, etc., are the concepts used here (see Augoyard and
Torgue, 2006: 17). The matter can become quite
technical and even sophisticated for the enthusiast. But for the
average researcher the standard options offered by
widely available recorders from manufacturers like Olympus,
Marantz, Tascam, or Sony are already demanding
enough and are usually more than adequate. These recorders are

also called ‘pcm-recorders’ or ‘linear pcm
recorders,’ where pcm stands for pulse-code modulation. The
term ‘pcm’ refers to a method for encoding analog audio
data into a digital format. One important thing to note about the
machinery involved is that the standard devices for
dictation or voice recording are targeted at specific levels of the
human voice. This equipment will not work for most
sound studies, since important portions of the sound
environment get cut out. Therefore sound recording regularly
begins by reading the manuals for technical gadgets in order to
get the desired recording. It makes a good deal of
sense to test out the whole process of setting up the systems,
defining and finding the acoustic object, recording and
transferring the object to the computer, and working on it before
a serious research involvement is at hand. For those
who really intend to go into serious recording, Makagon and
Neumann (2009: 73–81) provide a useful guide on
taping, microphones, recorders, headphones, and editing
software.
Besides handling hard- and software, there is another question
to think about before fieldwork starts: How much and
what kind of information besides the electromagnetic oscillation
on the recorder is needed? There is no simple answer
to that question, since even sound-only research designs can
vary remarkably. But because a sound object without a
context cannot make very much sense in social research, the
framework for the recording and the perspective for the

analysis should be defined beforehand, or at the latest during
the fieldwork. Here the famous phrase ‘the perceptual
“something” is always in the middle of something else, it
always forms a part of a “field”’ by Merleau-Ponty (1962: 4)
applies, and might stand as a reminder and a warning against a
purely positivistic approach to collecting data. In this
regard Bauer and Gaskell (2000) offer helpful concepts for
analysing sounds (noise and music) as social data.
Classical soundscape research usually records whole acoustic
surroundings or environments (as, for instance, the
World Soundscape Project did in Vancouver: see the section on
sound ecology) at selected times, and presents
selected exemplars of the sound objects and soundscapes in a
rather artistic way. These recordings are finally
documented on a CD and/or the Web and refer to a certain body
of related text. Indeed the Web might turn out to
become the appropriate medium in the future for the
presentation of sound studies, which operate with recorded
specimens of sounds. Whereas photographic data can be
displayed in printed matter, and even video data can to a
certain degree be presented in a similar manner, sound and print
do not coexist as well. So we need some
procedures to make sound visible. There are different options
available for the display of sound in such studies,
where plots of intensity (or amplitude) against time, or
frequency against amplitude, or time against frequency are the
best known. Such displays allow a quick visual distinction
between lo-fi and hi-fi environments. But, as we have
learnt, humans hear differently from machines due to their
capacity of selective listening. So: ‘I want the reader to
remain alert to the fact that all visual projections of sounds are
arbitrary and fictitious’ (Schafer, 1994: 127; italics in the
original). In principle, sounds can be classified according to
their physical quality (acoustics), the hearer's perception
of their effects (sound effect), their function and meaning

(semiotics and semantics), and their emotional qualities
(aesthetics). Thus a soundscape cannot be understood or
analysed by dividing it up into single parameters of, let us
say, acoustics. Having a soundscape is like having a book
compared to having just the letters of an alphabet and
some rules of the grammar, to use an analogy from linguistics.
Single-sound events such as, for instance, the barking
of a dog, the ringing of a church bell, or the blast of a foghorn,
but not complete soundscapes, might be described
and analysed according to their physical and their referential
aspects. The physical aspects in soundscape studies
are (Schafer, 1994: 134–7): distance, intensity in decibels,
distinctness of hearing (distinctly, moderate distinctly,
indistinctly), texture of ambiance (hi-fi, lo-fi, natural, human,
technological), occurrence (isolated, repeated, part of a
larger context), and environmental factors (no reverberation,
short reverberation, long reverberation, echo, drift,
displacement). The referential aspects of functions and the
meanings of sounds can only be organized arbitrarily
according to their empirical occurrence. A model of such a
catalogue is presented in the ‘Tuning of the World’
(Schafer, 1994: 137–9). Finally comes the mapping of whole
soundscapes. For this purpose so-called ‘sample sound
notation systems,’ the isobel, and the sound event map (Schafer,
1994: appendix I), have been developed. An isobel
map shows the distribution of the acoustic intensity within a
landscape along lines of equal intensity. The picture
produced looks very similar to the one produced by ordinary
contour lines on a geographic map but holds different
information. A sound event map reproduces the sound events at
a certain location over time. But even with these
techniques, the fundamental problem of hearing versus seeing
remains unsolved. All that visualization work can – at
its best – do is to soften the fact that sounds have to be heard
and cannot be seen. The fact still holds true today:
there is no best way to visualize sounds and soundscapes in

sound studies.
The empirical steps of an analysis in the tradition of the sonic
experience as exemplified by the sound effects
proposed by Augoyard and Torgue (2006) cannot be further
elaborated here. The matrix of the 66 effects, disciplines,
and categories of sonic effects form a three-dimensional array
of remarkable complexity. This matrix is not intended as
a manual or guideline, which has to be used in its entirety in
each analysis. The 16 main effects described, or even a
combination thereof, can be used for research in and on acoustic
settings. But the variance of the internal
construction of the effects and hence the corresponding
empirical approach derived from them (sound and video
recording, see Knoblauch et al., Chapter 30; interview, see
Roulston, Chapter 20; and participant observation, see
Marvasti, Chapter 24, this volume), plus their interrelatedness,
make it necessary for the interested researcher to
consult the list and then to consider what to register and to
analyse.
If we finally leave the presentation and analysis of recorded
sound and engage in participant observation, interviews,
documents, and even movies or television broadcasts as data,
we are approaching the level of sound practice and
sound culture studies by means of ethnography. Here it is not
primarily the sound itself which comes under scrutiny,
but the social practices which produce or refer to sound, a

soundscape, or an acoustic environment. A study worth
reading in this realm is that by Panayotis Panopoulos (2003). He
analyses the meanings and functions of animal bells
with regard to gender, families, reputations, and economy in a
pastoral culture. Although some romanticism of the
kind of à la recherche du temps perdu in the study cannot be
ignored, the text demonstrates in an exemplary and
stunning way how sound, artifacts, and culture are interwoven
phenomena.6 One of the few sociological contributions
using ethnography with a focus on sound is Daniel Lee's study
on barbershop quartet singing (2005). He deals with
the important question of the distinction between noise and
music, and he shows how vocal noise can be turned into
music in a complex way and only in a particular culturally
embedded context. But sound practice can become even
more complex than singing, which is already not simple. If we
take the techno-sphere as a medium for sound
production and reproduction, as Steve Wurtzler (1992) does in
his study ‘“She sang live, but the microphone was
turned off”: The live, the recorded and the subject of
representation,’ we become aware of how intertwined culture
and
sound and the corresponding analysis can become. This brings
us to the dark side of sounds, where sonic warfare
(Goodman, 2010) is addressed. Sound can also be deployed to
produce fear and dread. The sonic dimensions of
conflict are old, and the militarization of sound has a long
history from antiquity up to the torture of prisoners in
Guantanamo Bay by very loud rock music. So it does not come
as a surprise that sonic force and sonic power can be
topics for sound research too. And finally we should not
overlook the fact that when we turn our computers on we
receive a sound logo. This is not only a functional sound,
providing information on the status of the technical system,
but also, as a logo, a symbolic part of our economies. So it is no

longer a surprise that the German car maker Audi
tunes not only the sound of the engine-which many other car
makers do too – but also the sound of the doors and
even the whole company by the use of a concept of sound as its
own Klangsprache (= language of sounds).7
Concluding Remarks
Sound studies challenge qualitative research in different ways.
First, the ear as an important human sense has
largely been ignored in comparison to the eye. There has not yet
been an effort to conceptualize an analytic
apparatus comparable to that for vision (e.g., Knoblauch and
Schnettler, 2009; also see Knoblauch et al., Chapter 30,
this volume). Hence the field of sound studies remains rather
exotic and unfamiliar to the qualitative researcher.
Second, qualitative research has also largely ignored any
theoretical study of the acoustic environment except speech
or music. Thus it remains unclear if there will ever be
qualitative research that takes the sonic environment into
consideration and transcends the language-focused and visual-
oriented mainstream of current qualitative social
research. However, the sound culture studies might have opened
a promising route: they showed how the tunes of
the world are analytically transformed into the sounds in and of
society.
Notes

1 . T h e p u b l i s h e r A s h g a t e d e v o t e s a s p e c i
a l e d i t i o n t o t h e t o p i c o f e t h n o m u s i c o l o g
y . S e e :
http://www.ashgate.com/music (accessed 15 May 2013).
2. An informative description of the project and even some
audio samples are available at the website:
http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html (accessed 15 May 2013).
3. See the website of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology:
http://wfae.proscenia.net/about/index.html (accessed 15
May 2013).
4. The concept of the soundscape appears to be very attractive,
but it is also contested and often misunderstood
(Kelman, 2010).
5. One of the reviewers of this text remarked, ‘if you think loud
car sound systems are limited to the inside of the car,
you don't live in a big urban city, with “Boombox” culture!’
This is certainly true, and I do not want to overstretch my
argument. But the sound of ‘Boomboxes’ obviously exactly
constitutes a particular urban space for those involved.
6. An inspiring impression of how anthropology approaches
sounds was actually the program for a conference on
‘Milieux Sonores (MILSON)’ held in Paris in 2011. The link is:

http://milson.fr/je2011/ (accessed 15 May 2013).
7 . S e e https://www.audi-
mediaservices.com/publish/ms/content/de/public/pressemitteilun
gen/2010/08/23/sound_satt__wie_klingt.standard.gid-
oeffentlichkeit.html (accessed 15 May 2013).
Further Reading
References
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243.n29
http://www.ashgate.com/music
http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html
http://wfae.proscenia.net/about/index.html
http://milson.fr/je2011/
https://www.audi-
mediaservices.com/publish/ms/content/de/public/pressemitteilun
gen/2010/08/23/sound_satt__wie_klingt.standard.gid-
oeffentlichkeit.html
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243.n29

Assignment: Pick one analytic approach (I have chosen
“Analysing Sounds”, I will send this chapter to you) and
prepare a one-page handout for class next week.
The handout should include:
· A succinct definition/explanation
· A summary of the key points in the analytic approach
· 3 exemplar studies using the analytic approach in the arts

Analysing SoundsIn The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data An.docx

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