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.
Author(s): Iris Haukamp, Christin Hoene, Martyn David Smith
Series: Routledge Contemporary Asia Series, 80
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 310
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introducing Asian Sound Cultures
Sound, modernity, and Asia
The politics of voice
Modern noise
Sound and power
Technology and imperialism
Asia as method, or: Why listen to Asia?
References
Part I: The politics of voice
Chapter 1: The phonographic politics of ‘corporeal voice’: Speech recordings for imperial subjectification and wartime mobilisation in colonial Taiwan and Korea
Introduction
The corporeal voice of a war god
Echoes from the Russo-Japanese War
Admonishing the Taiwanese islanders and youths: Kobayashi Seizō
Mobilising for the new-order regime in wartime Korea: Minami Jirō
Calling the living to battlefields in the empire of silence
Cultivating a deaf ear in the shelter of the silenced
Conclusion
Notes
References
Newspapers and periodicals (language, place)
Chapter 2: In dark times: Poetic dissonance in the Thai-Malay borderlands
Introduction
Voice and political subjectivity
This is not the ‘deep south’
From voice to dialogue
The microphone
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Sonic aesthetics and social disparity: The voice of villains in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran (2015) and The Unjust (2010)
Introduction
The five bandits’ villainy endures in South Korea
The Unjust and Veteran
Contempt and sarcasm
Indignation and sarcasm
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Appendix: Spectrograms
Notes
References
Filmography
Part II: Modern noise
Chapter 4: Aesthetic ruptures and sociabilities: Tateyama Noboru (1876–1926), quotidian noise, and sōkyoku-jiuta
Introduction
Aesthetic beginnings and the culture of sentiment: Endless melody, and the pre-modern understandings of musical meaning
Early Meiji composers and change
New sociability: The outside has been brought inside
Concluding observations
Notes
References
Chapter 5: The ‘hell of modern sound’: A history of urban noise in modern Japan
Introduction
The changing ecology of sound
Defining, understanding, and controlling noise
Reconstruction and the re-definition of the problem
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 6: Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese Noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound
Introduction
An exoticism
The making of a genre
A contrasting Japanese musical sound
The neurophysiologic justification of aural differences
A positive binder between dualities
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Part III: Sound and power
Chapter 7: Listening to the talkies: Atarashiki tsuchi’s (1937) acoustic construction of Japan for western consumption
Introduction
Music
Noise
Voice
Conclusion
Notes
References
Films
Chapter 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)
Introduction
The history of Hong Kong: Are Hong Kongers heard?
The hierarchy in Chinese writing: The split of sound and script
Nanyin : Inaudible Cantonese culture
Mapping the lost sounds in Hong Kong
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 9: When the looms stop, the baby cries: The changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono-making industry
Introduction
Reconsidering sound
Nishijin orimono
Definition and history
The Nishijin sonic environment
Yūzen
Definition and history
The Kyō-yūzen sonic environment
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part IV: Technology and imperialism
Chapter 10: Early radio in late colonial India: Historiography, geography, audiences
Introduction
A brief history of radio historiography in colonial India
Space and place: From the local to the global
Imagining radio audiences
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 11: (Re)Diffusion of beautiful sound: Chinese broadcast in post-war Bangkok
Introduction
When sound meets technology: The origin of the Rediffusion broadcast
The Rediffusion broadcast and Bangkok’s urban phenomenon
Behind Rediffusion: the Chinese Sound and the Thai State
Beautiful sound and its implications
Women’s great learning: Gua Ceh and Chaozhou operas
The popularisation of literary classics and modern literature
Connecting through pop music
Conclusion: Why is the sound beautiful?
Notes
References
Chapter 12: Arranging sounds from daily life: Amateur sound-recording contests and audio culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s
Introduction
Amateur sound-recording contests in Japanese audio culture during the 1960s and 1970s
Amateur recording contests in the 1970s
From the joy of sound recording to designing sound: Transition in the AURC
Restarting the AURC and after
Who creates sounds? Award winners of the AURC
Sound recording as a hobby
Sound-recording contests as an opportunity for self-examination
Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Chapter 13: The dual fate of the twin horn in Thailand: From United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processional bands’ sound system
Introduction
Twin Horns as weapon of anti-communist propaganda
Sound propaganda and the grassroots takeover of amplification
Twin Horns as a definitive component of the phin prayuk set-up
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
