Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology

This book examines the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technologies across Asia.

Including a series of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary case studies, the book reveals sound as central to the experience of modernity in Asia and as essential to the understanding of the historical processes of cultural, social, political, and economic transformation throughout the long twentieth century. Presenting a broad range of topics – from the changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry to radio in late colonial India – the book explores how the study of Asian sound cultures offers greater insight into historical accounts of local and global transformation.

Challenging us to rethink and reassemble important categories in sound studies, this book will be a vital resource for students and scholars of sound studies, Asian studies, history, postcolonial studies, and media studies.

Table of Contents
Introducing Asian Sound Cultures
Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene and Martyn David Smith
Part 1: The politics of voice
1. The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’: Speech recordings for imperial subjectification and wartime mobilization in colonial Taiwan and Korea
Yamauchi Fumitaka
2. In dark times: Poetic dissonance in the Thai-Malay borderlands
Noah Viernes
3. Sonic aesthetics and social disparity: The voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010)
Jina Eleanor Kim
Part 2: Modern noise
4. Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities: Tateyama Noboru (1876–1926), quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta
Philip Flavin
5. The ‘hell of modern sound’: A history of urban noise in modern Japan
Martyn David Smith
6. Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound
Jeremy Corral
Part 3: Sound and power
7. Listening to the talkies: Atarashiki tsuchi’s (1937) acoustic construction of Japan for western consumption
Iris Haukamp
8. Recovering the lost Cantonese sounds in pre-handover Hong Kong: Sinophone politics in Dung Kai-cheung’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street’ (1995)
Ka Lee Wong
9. When the looms stop, the baby cries: The changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry
Jenny Hall
Part 4: Technology and imperialism
10. Early radio in late colonial India: Historiography, geography, audiences
Vebhuti Duggal and Christin Hoene
11. (Re) Diffusion of beautiful sound: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok
Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt
12. Arranging sounds from daily life: Amateur sound-recording contests and audio culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s
Tomotaro Kaneko
13. The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand: From United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processional bands’ sound system
Pierre Prouteau