Karin Bijsterveld's research while affiliated with Maastricht University and other places
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Publications (41)
This chapter shows how Sanjib Datta Chowdhury’s anthropological work on spatial rituals in a Dutch residential home for the elderly changed my historical narrative on postwar policies concerning such homes. My initial argument revolved around policymakers’ reports and their notions of good care and independency. Chowdhury’s approach, however, made...
In January 2019, the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris presented the conference Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies. ¹ A spectacular video announces the event: a heavy-metal band screams about the conference’s themes and cries out each speaker’s name,...
Ob als Oper, Musical, dramatische Montage oder historisches Pastiche: Performative Zugänge zur Musikgeschichtsschreibung bringen Geschichte auf die Bühne. Dazu stellen sie Verbindungen zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart her und arbeiten mit Klängen, historischem Material oder etablierten Bildern von Künstler*innen. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes...
Raymond Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecologist vocabulary, goals and tactics have recently been taken up by European noise abatement societies. Yet how does this relate to their more traditional noise abatement strategies? And what might be behind it? This chapter answers these questions by analyzing the websites and publications of three major Europe...
We tend to associate the sciences with seeing—but scientists, engineers, and physicians also use their ears as a means for acquiring knowledge. This chapter introduces this essay’s key questions about the role of sound and practices of listening in the sciences, and explicates their relevance for understanding the dynamics of science more generally...
This chapter focuses on processes of representing and sharing sound in the sciences. How have scientists, engineers, and physicians talked about sound and transcribed sound into legible signs? What did they do to ensure the acceptability and standardization of their verbalizations and notations? Why did embodied forms of notation survive despite a...
This chapter presents a typology of the modes of listening employed across science, medicine, and engineering. It distinguishes between three purposes of listening and three ways of listening in the sciences. The three purposes discussed are diagnostic, monitory, and exploratory listening; the three ways are analytic, synthetic, and interactive lis...
This chapter combines a diachronic with a synchronic approach. It explains how different ensembles of sonic skills, or sets of sonic skills in specific settings, come to prevail with shifting relations between science and technology, science and the professions, and science and society. These ensembles reflect the significance of timing, trust, and...
This chapter asks how listening in the sciences became contested over time. Why did sonic skills, and notably diagnostic analytic listening, acquire such an ambiguous epistemological status? The chapter traces the rise of mechanical and visual technologies such as the spectrograph, and the shifting relationships of trust between makers and users of...
This chapter aims to explain why practices of listening continue to “pop up” as routes into knowledge-making despite the dominance of visualization in the sciences. It identifies three recent trends behind this phenomenon: the rise and versatility of digital technologies, the significance of somatic vigilance and synchronization in today’s large in...
It is common for us today to associate the practice of science primarily with the act of seeing—with staring at computer screens, analyzing graphs, and presenting images. We may notice that physicians use stethoscopes to listen for disease, that biologists tune into sound recordings to understand birds, or that engineers have created Geiger tellers...
Western audiences have long been fascinated with music automata. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that art and music curators display historical examples of such mechanical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic so...
Between March 2013 and November 2014, the Amsterdam Museum had an installation that enabled visitors to compare a recent soundscape recording of the Dam Square with simulations of how the Dam sounded in 1895 and 1935. Constructing these simulations involved virtual acoustics software, recordings of historical artifacts, and research into the urban...
This article investigates the role of listening in the knowledge making practices of Western scientists, engineers, and physicians from the 1920s onwards. It does so by offering a two-dimensional typology of the modes of listening that they employ. Distinguishing between two dimensions allows us to make sense both of the purpose and of the ways in...
Radio finds a highly captive audience in the car. Motorists listen to radio for music and generic news, but also prick up their ears for specific traffic reports, despite the recent rise of navigation technologies with real-time traffic information. Traffic radio helps drivers to prepare for or prevent traffic problems. This essay explores the cont...
Traffic noise was seen as a serious problem around 1930. Cars and trucks were noisier than today, and the horn was used more frequently. This led to loud protests and anti-noise campaigns, which have been discussed by historians in studies of the evolution of traffic noise in the twentieth
century. In this article we first describe the situation ar...
Are the humanities still relevant in the twenty-first century? In the context of pervasive economic liberalism and shrinking budgets, the importance of humanities research for society is increasingly put into question. This volume claims that the humanities do indeed matter by offering empirically grounded critical reflections on contemporary cultu...
Sound is no longer produced only by humans and nature. New sources of sound such as the iPod and cell phones demonstrate that sounds have become personal and mobile. New sounds such as those of industrialization, automobile engine, and electronic sounds have entered the "soundscape". Sounds can be captured in new ways, which are becoming a part of...
Since the late 1990s, leading automobile manufacturers have advertised the sonic qualities and interior tranquility of their vehicles with increasing zeal. This article focuses on the rise of a new tradition of testing car sound in the European automotive industry in the 1990s. It explores three issues: the way in which defining the "reality" of so...
Since the late 1990s, car manufacturers increasingly underline their cars' interior tranquility. Both this acoustic condition and the availability of car audio sets enable drivers to transform their car into a highly personal, controlled and relaxing sonic bubble.Yet how could the car, once a noisy contraction, evolve into such a space for acoustic...
The historiography of musical instrument design has long been dominated by organology: the science of musical instruments and their classification. Recently, however, scholars from Science & Technology Studies (STS) have also taken up the study of musical instrument development. This article reviews the newest organological and STS literature on mu...
Ever since the eighteenth century, physicians have claimed that the noise of hammering and other industrial activities may induce hearing loss. Protecting workers' hearing by the use of earplugs was one of the solutions proposed, particularly after the Second World War. Employees, however, often declined the medics' help. This article examines the...
Professional music journals frequently publish descriptions of newly registered patents concerning classical musical instruments. Only a few of the many proposals for innovation actually enter production. The large number of ideas for improving musical instruments such as the violin, the flute and the bassoon contrasts strikingly with the stability...
The debate surrounding the introduction of new musical instruments is examined as a way to elicit norms underlying musical practice and culture. The paper details the introduction of three twentieth century instruments: the player piano, the "noise instruments" of the futurists and the electronic music synthesizer. The responses to these new instru...
Science and technology have played a crucial role in regulating problems resulting from urban overcrowding. In the twentieth century, the decibel became a major factor in controlling, for instance, urban traffic noise in the Netherlands. "The city of din" led to the creation of the portable noise meter to measure decibels, but the urban context als...
New technologies profoundly change our sonic surroundings, the world's soundscape. However, research dealing with the sound of technology is scarce within Science and Technology Studies (S&TS). This study argues that such a silence should be broken, since the sound of technology not only tunes our sonic environment, but has also been a highly contr...
Technology and Culture 41.3 (2000) 485-515
"Every house plan I will continue to see as a VAC woman: walking through a plan, in my mind slamming doors and placing cupboards, figuring out where and how I would sleep, wash, cook, relax, and play with children in this situation." So wrote the outgoing chairwoman of one of the Netherlands' Vrouwen Advie...
The Dutch Women's Action Committee for Early State Pensions advocated the reduction of the retirement age for unmarried women. In doing this, the committee brought forward an image of older unmarried women that was rather different from the self-images the older unmarried women presented in letters and questionnaires sent to the committee. And the...
Citations
... Since technologies and musical practices co-evolve and are mutually shaped (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004), it is important to pay attention to the historical development of music infrastructures and platforms in relation to music scenes. A historical sensitivity to the evolution of digital music infrastructures might help to highlight not only how new technologies reshape musical practices, but also how music logics have contributed to certain specific features of digital infrastructures. ...
... O ruído tem uma história própria que não tem expressão isoladamente, mas apenas em contexto ou processo de relacionamento com outros sons e a intervenção humana. A história do ruído é, portanto, social e ganhou uma renovada dimensão na era da urbanidade moderna e industrial, quando o som das cidades modernas se combinou, substituiu e mesmo eliminou o conjunto dos velhos sons pré-industriais que são percebidos hoje como manifestações de "resistência" de sonoridades em agonia (Fortuna, 1999;Sterne, 2003;Bijsterveld et al., 2013;Corbin, 2016). 9 É neste cenário que se desenrola o que atrás designei por paradigma dos sons urbanos que retirou à natureza e à vocalidade humana a prerrogativa do ruído. ...
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... In other words, listening would also depend on the ways in which the 'subject,' or human agent's body, performs the act of listening. Various taxonomies of listening modes have been proposed, for instance in composition / sonic arts and musicology by Schaeffer (1966), Chion (1990), and Huron (2003); in electroacoustic music analysis by Smalley (1986), Delalande (2008), and Roy (2003); in music cognition by Tuuri and Eerola (2012); in interaction design by Gaver (1993); and in medicine and engineering by Bijsterveld (2019). What these fields have in common is a shared attention to 1) the movement/action causing sound (e.g. ...
... In many practical cases of listening, the practitioner intervenes interactively into the sound while listening. For example, ornithologists could add other birdsongs or geophonic sounds into the environment to listen to how different birds react (Bijsterveld, 2019a). ...
... A Google Scholar search on August 27, 2013, yielded 12,000 hits for publications about or using the semantic differential method since 2009. The automotive industry is one of the fields employing the method, for example for consumer evaluations of car sound (Cleophas and Bijsterveld 2012). The idea of using pairs of polar terms to study meaning was not Solomon's invention. ...
... The emergence of sound art coincides with growing attention to sound throughout the social sciences, as exemplified by sound studies (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012;Sterne, 2012) which focus on theoretical and epistemological understandings of sound as a «relational medium», in which and through which knowledge, social relations and interactions, and organizational dynamics deploy (Sicca, 2000). The recognition of sound's importance in structuring and organizing social reality has produced a growing focus on sound in organization studies (Hatch, 1999;Sicca, 2000;Koivunen, 2002;Corbett, 2003;Sicca and Zan, 2005;Prichard, Korczynski and Elmes, 2007;Kaulingfreks, 2010;Bathurst, 2010;Styhre, 2013;Michels and Steyaert, 2017). ...
... The previously outlined work by Montan (2002) and Zimmermann & Lorenz (2008) speak to the potential of the gallery and museum environment for the practical application and study of audio augmented objects. There are also other early audio augmented reality projects in which such environments have been identified as fruitful contexts within which to study the combination of virtual audio content and physical object, Bederson (1995) and Bijsterveld (2015) being two such additional examples. Whilst previous AR interventions within these environments highlight the potential curatorial and institutional benefits for AAR interventions within these contexts (Thiel, 2014). ...
... Not to be elaborated on, but included for the sake of completeness, are distinctions of listening modes in very specific contexts. Supper and Bijsterveld (2015), for example, investigate different modes of occupationspecific listening (e.g., of doctors and mechanics), and Douglas (2013) distinguishes modes of radio listening alongside attentional and imaginational levels (e.g., listening to sports, war reporting, news, music). ...
... En el documental de televisión de la BBC de 2007, «La vida secreta de las carreteras», referido por Bijsterveld, & Dieker, (2015), un locutor de radio, de manera irónica, asegura saber «los dos lugares en los que tienes una relación íntima con el radioescucha. La primera es el auto, porque ahí tienes una audiencia cautiva. ...
Reference: Radio en el automóvil: audiencia atrapada.
... One of the main source of harmful impact in cities remains road transport. It is also an important factor in the impact of roads on the environment, the noise from the moving traffic [1,2]. Almost every urban resident continuously or periodically experiences various harmful acoustic influence [3]. ...
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