ABSTRACT
Conceptualising Sound as a Voluminous Entity. Discourses, Media, Practices
In a couple of—rather heterogeneous—discourses in the first decades of the twentieth century (music sociology, perception psychology and electroacoustics), sound was defined as an entity with “volume” (e.g., Bekker 1923 [1917]; Rich, 1916; Stevens, 1934; Tyers, 1923). This was a rather new conceptualisation of sound, a “sound concept” (Wicke 2016), which correlated not only with specific discourses about music and sound, listening and space. Moreover, it colluded with new listening practices that combined listening and vibrating as well as with new media technologies such as loudspeakers, microphones, and electronic amplifiers. As an explicitly voluminous entity sound was characterised by a certain extension in space. Thus, at an epistemological level we can argue that sound became conceptualised as an entity that was not only defined and understood by parameters such as “frequency” and “pitch”, “amplitude” or “sound pressure”. In addition, sound became an entity that was defined increasingly through volume and, thus, transformed into a voluminous entity. However, as we will see, volume has proved to be a rather fuzzy concept.
