Turn on the radio, the television or just open your window and let the outside sound flow in. What do you hear? voices? music? traffic noise? the wind? birds? Sound is all around us, and continuously inform us about the world.

Close your eyes and make sound: tap your feet, hum or scream! Listen and notice how sound brings back the environment: The size of the room you are in, its shape and materials.

Sound is intermediate. It is a quality of the world. It informs us about processes, levels of energy, of space and time. Yet sound is also an object in itself. We can quite accurately describe the qualities of a sound using words like tone, timbre, rhythm, frequency, loudness, reverberation, interference etc.

With modern audio technologies sound has become available for analysis and manipulation in radically new ways. It has for more than 100 years now been possible to store and replay representations of the fleeting world of temporary sound impressions (compare for instance to smell or taste). Sounds have, as the ‘father’ of soundscape theory, R. Murray Schafer, expressed it: “been torn from their natural sockets” (The Tuning of the World, 1977 p. 90.), and could, as another father in sound studies, Pierre Schaefer, expressed it, be the object of “blind listening to sonorous effects and contents” (Schaeffer  p. 79).

It is this double character of at once being, in our perception, causally connected to movement of some kind (the bow against the string, the motor running, or the person talking), and at the same time being itself an object, that allows sound studies to become a particularly potent field of study within the overall field of interdisciplinary investigations of sensuous forms and their codification in culture.

In sound studies, sound is not to be understood as ‘pure’ sensuous data, that informs us about how the world 'really is' (as opposed to say writing or television). There is nothing pure about the senses, we might argue. Rather it is the assumption that every sonic impression is interpreted in a cultural context much like language is. Sound comes to us embedded in a socially and culturally constructed context, through which it becomes meaningful. It is true that some sounds, particularly those connected to the body, are almost equally decoded all over the world, yet there is a world of difference between the social meaning of a burp in Sweden and in China.  

Sound studies explore the practices of signification connected to sound – not in order to produce a vocabulary of sound and meaning, but in order to assist in the interpretation of cultures, the analysis of environments, artworks, architecture and human interaction and in the design of sound for movies, radio and podcasts. And not the least to continuously question some of the assumptions we make about sound and listening. Sound studies is not here to build up a theology around sound, and argue that listening is a particularly emphatic activity or that sound inform us about particularly important aspects of the world. Sound studies simply insists on the importance of studying sound in context.