Brandon LaBelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture 
and Everyday Life. New York and London: Continuum. 

Reviewed by Luke Fischbeck 

Where do sounds come from, and where do they go? is the framing question 
of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle's 
wide-ranging investigation into the function of sound as a binding, relational 
medium. This core query is answered with a series of gestures: self-touching, 
gesturing to the air, touching others. Over the book's course, LaBelle amply 
demonstrates how much about the acoustic paradigm can be read into this 
simple (silent) interaction: how sound-and listening-attaches us to one 
another and to our environments, and the ways in which these attachments 
are woven into the shared condition of the everyday. 

In a book about subtle and fleeting connections, any attempts at narra­
tive continuity seem overwrought. Often Acoustic Territories reads more as 
a collection of standalone essays-three of the six chapters presented here 
have appeared on their own and carry perceptible shifts in attention and 
scope-that, when placed together, seem to shatter into myriad discrete 
points of departure, courtesy of the great wealth of examples. Each fragment 
begs further interest. In some ways it follows from where LaBelle began in 
his 2006 historical survey of sound art practices, Background Noise, now 
juxtaposing case studies and theoretical writing on sound with examples 
of artistic intervention, intentionally blurring the already vague boundaries 
between "sound culture" and "sound art," traveling from site to site without 
historical linearity. In another sense the text is a targeted contribution to the 
slippery and expanding field of sound studies that examines "the exchanges 
between environments and the people within them as registered through 
aural experience" and takes into account the "careful consideration of the 
performative relations inherent to urban spatiality;' proposing "sound 
studies as a practice poised to creatively engage these relations" (LaBelle 
2010, xviii). 

Is there any way to speak precisely about sound studies? Constructed 
as scaffolding onto an open-ended array of established fields (including 
musicology, sociology, history of art, performance studies, and the study 
of science and technology), it eschews strict formal boundaries, taking the 
shape of correlative networks. The 2010 Society for Ethnomusicology an­
nual meeting, held in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Acoustic 
Territories, took the theme "Sound Ecologies," foregrounding music's link 
to discussions of human rights, social action, identity, and environmental 

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issues. The question of how an ethnomusicologists' study of sound is shaped 
by certain of sound's fundamental characteristics-transitory, relational, 

subjective-resonates with many: 

The study of sound, hailed as an "emerging field" for the last hundred 
years, exhibits a strong tendency to remain that way, always emerging, 
never emerged ... whispering unobtrusively in the background while the 
main action occurs elsewhere. This would echo the position that most 
writers on the topic attribute to sound itself-constantly subjugated to the 
primacy of the visual, associated with emotion and subjectivity as against 
the objectivity and rationality of vision, seen as somehow more "natural" 
and less constructed as a mode of communication. (Hilmes 2005:249) 

LaBelle identifies the revolutionary immanence of that thing which is always 
emerging. In writing Acoustic Territories, he repositions sound studies as 
radically engaged-a listening science with the potential to reveal sound's 
social materiality as it draws transformative meaning out of the background 
noise of the everyday: 

[WJhat is at stake for me is to explicate a position that is also already 
unfixed-a position that is in tune with the material and paradigmatic 
energy found within sound, that weave of intensity and ephemerality, of 
animate flexibility and charged spatiality, and importantly, within listening 
as a central and organizational perspective. It is my sense that an audi­
tory paradigm is tacitly embedded within the contemporary condition 
and offers a compelling structure for elaborating what is already in play. 
(LaBelle 201 O:xviii) 

The problem at hand is the dual nature sound acquires when examined as 
social material: it is both a thing that can be pointed to and described-an 
ecological balance, a stasis, a shape that informs-and a binding process, 
continually in flux, rending and repairing, seeking out, affecting, resounding, 
and decaying. Conjuring a description of this elusive materiality, LaBelle 

writes in the foreword to his earlier book that: 

Sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, 
communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body and enters others; it 
binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body mov­
ing; the mind dreaming, the air oscillating. It seeminly eludes definition, 
while having profound effect. (LaBelle 2006:ix) 

By choosing to elaborate on those relational networks that arise through 
the act of listening, LaBelle avoids direct overlap with other contemporary 
investigations into the materiality of sound per se, such as David Toop's 
Sinister Resonance (2010, also published by Continuum)-which constructs 



Luke Fischbeck 

a history of listening, unpacking the literary and artistic use of sound as a 
metaphor for the intangible and uncanny. Whereas Toop's writing, with its 
engaging flow, approaches the feel of a lyrical memoir, Acoustic Territories 
operates through a kind of disruptive pulsing-forcing links between associ­
ated threads, doubling back on itself to reiterate a point, spiraling outwards 
to avoid easy conclusions. 

Acoustic Territories is part of LaBelle's wider set of occupations: sound 
artist, publisher of Errant Bodies Press, and part of the curatorial project 
"Surface Tension" -all practices that emphasize direct engagement, col­
laboration, and site-specific experimentation. There is little evidence that 
LaBelle is content to occupy any kind of objective distance from which to 
construct an analytical framework for his subject matter, opting instead to 
situate his writing within what he terms the "relational frame" of listening, 
" ... whose focus, clarity, and directness are endlessly supplemented and 
displaced by the subtle pulses, mishearings, and fragmentary richness of 
relating. That is to say, listening may be so intensely relational by operating 
as a weak model of subjectivity, to ultimately nurture more horizontal or 
distracted forms of experience" (LaBelle 2010:182-3). LaBelle, as a writer, is 
occupying Steven Connor's "Modern Auditory I," wherein "the self, defined 
in terms of hearing rather than sight, is a self imaged not as a point, but as a 
membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises 
and musics travel" (Connor 1997:207). 

What is most interesting here is the confluence of LaBelle's choice of 
style-itinerant, associative, disjunctive, and yet forcefully intentional-and 
the subject matter at hand. How is it possible to write about sound culture 
and everyday life, to stay focused, to decide where to begin and where to end, 
what to include (and exclude)? LaBelle makes it clear that this problem of 
focus, inherent in the act oflistening, is precisely what guides his investiga­
tion on its wild path: 

[T]he ear veers and slips, focuses and drifts; I follow your words, and at 
times, I grow distracted, by the sounds outside, by my own thinking. Rather 
than strictly occupy the clear channel, the center of language, to engage the 
primary spatial event, listening imparts meaningful experiences through 
a fluctuation of focus that brings one in and around the mass and verve 
of so much sonic materiality, of otherness. The audible spatiality of the 
near and the far endlessly shifts attention from what is in front to what 
is behind, bringing the abstract and the concrete, the said and the unsaid 
into fruitful contact. (LaBelle 2010:184) 

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In order to trace this contact with otherness that listening promises to 
open, LaBelle moves through a series of shifts in scale, with each chapter 
devoted to a particular type of site: underground, home, sidewalk, street, 
shopping mall, and sky. By approaching each site as a virtual and actual 
space, LaBelle engages cultural, philosophical, and environmental aspects 
of urban life, leaving ample room for both concrete examples and free as­
sociation. "Underground;' for instance, becomes a space for subway buskers, 
air-raid shelters, resistance fighters, and reverberating cisterns, but also for 
a construction of self by way of the "acousmatic" echo-making, as: 

... Every sound [is 1 a voice that breaks from its source to become something 
greater, more powerful and suggestive, a sound no longer bound to earth. 
That is to say, the echo is a sound that comes back to haunt, returning as 
transformed through its diffusion and ultimate regrouping into an alto­
gether different expression. The echo delivers our own alter-ego. (15) 

Beginning here, and continuing throughout the book, LaBelle strategically 
employs "the particular effect of , dec entering' focus ... to bring forward an 
entire scene" (40) that he is identifying as a property of the acousmatic event, 
in which sound is experienced without reference to any identifiable source. 
From the underground, there is a disjunctive shift into the home or, more 
broadly, the psychic state of home. Following Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of 
Space (1969), LaBelle describes home as "a syntax for commonality, placed 
in contrast to the verve of urban life and all its differentiating fragments" 
(49), In examining the ways in which sound creates territories-in particular 
the contrast between public and private space-LaBelle presents one of the 
book's most beautifully explicated arguments. Calling for a more nuanced 
understanding of the spectrum between silence and noise, he invites the 
reader to rethink the "simple formulation that 'noise is a form of acoustic 
violence;" thereby "considering how silence might also perform violently" 
(80) when used "to separate, ward off, and contain" (66). In defense of 
sound's potential to produce fruitful connections, even as it creates conflict, 
LaBelle invokes Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of responsibility as 
beginning in face-to-face confrontation with one another, as well as Chantal 
Mouffe's "agonistic space," in which the unresolved tension of confrontation 
serves as a requisite platform for plurality, discourse, and democracy. 

The third chapter, "Sidewalk: Steps, Gait, and Rhythmic Journey-Forms;' 
introduces the aspect of scale and charts the relationships between bodies 
and their surroundings, from immediate physical contact to entrainment 
within global patterns. LaBelle does well to apply the acoustic paradigm to 
theoretical writing that does not explicitly refer to sound, from philosopher 
Michel de Certeau's view of walking as a means of re-writing that which 



Luke Fischbeck 

has been inscribed on the body by the built environment; through urban 
theorist Jane Jacobs's description of the sidewalk as a mediating space; to 
the "journey-form" where, as Nicholas Bourriaud writes in The Radicant, 
"the finding of forms takes place through the composition of a line of flight, 
or even a program of translation, more than the elaboration of a plane or 
volume" (Bourriaud 2009:114). 

The extended metaphor of the car is the basis for chapter four, "Street: 
Auditory Latching, Cars, and the Dynamics of Vibration:' in which the 
machine becomes a sensing and signifying extension of the skin (and the 
self) and, as a heavily constructed interior space, a stand-in for exterior 
soundscapes. LaBelle's term "auditory latching" expands on Tia DeNora's 
study of the ways in which music provides the listener with scaffolding for 
an embodied awareness, describing the tactile sensation of listening that 
connects us to the material world. By placing focus on the physicality of 
sound at the threshold of hearing, as vibrations felt across the body, LaBelle 
arrives at a definition of listening in terms of a total engagement between 
individual and environment, albeit an engagement which remains fluid, in 
motion. 

Having established the various dynamics by which sound engenders 
contact between listeners-through confrontation or echo, through direct 
or mediated engagement with the environment-LaBelle enters into an in­
depth discussion of distracted listening, or the way meaning is constructed 
out of a shared, ambiguous background. Chapter five, "Shopping Mall: 
Muzak, Mishearing, and the Productive Volatility of Feedback," returns to 
the foundational work of R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax in the field 
of "acoustic ecology" -specifically, the characterization of our connection 
to the sounds that surround us as through a communicational feedback 
network-in order to better understand the poetics of sound, how it sustains 
complexity even in its instability: 

... As a communicative medium sound carries information that is in­
herently temporal and evanescent-it can only communicate by always 
already disappearing into the environment. It thus supplies communica­
tion with a vital medium-to truly hear the world and each other-while 
unsettling signification with instability-to listen is to also confront the 

voluptuous richness of ambiguity. (LaBelle 2010:200) 

In its ambiguity, sound's elliptical and expansive qualities find productive 
interaction with the background material of "the everyday," a term which, 
in LaBelle's usage, draws implicitly from the work of Henri Lefebvre, who 
describes "the most universal and the most unique condition, the most 
social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden. 

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A condition stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of 
functions, inscribed within structures" (Lefebvre 1987:9). It is to LaBelle's 
credit that throughout Acoustic Territories he is able to convey the effect of 
this ever-present ambiguity by means of concrete examples-alarm bells, 
pedestrian sounds, the development of muzak (and its parallels with musique 
concrete )-and leaps from site to site without succumbing to the desire to 
neatly contain what he finds within a larger descriptive framework. As Paul 
Carter writes in Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and Auditory Space, ''Auditory 
space is durational, but it lacks music's (and writing's) commitment to linear 
development. Without a sense of ending, it is not located between silences" 
(Carter 2004;59). 

The book's final chapter-an ethereal fantasy on radiophonic space, 
projected subjectivities, spirit recording, and utopian transmissions-leaves 
behind the physical aspects of acoustic space. By stripping sonic materiality 
of its connection to bodies and the built environment, LaBelle creates an 
inversion (acutely shown here in the example of the "unitary urbanism" 
advocated by Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Situationist International), in 
which the immanent forms and itinerant networks implied by sound frame 
the construction of a city in flux and always at play. 

Without a clear conclusion or resolved tautology, Acoustic Territories 
functions best as a proposal for a mode of listening (and writing about 
listening) that "considers that sounds begin and end in noise" (Carter 
2004:62). For "noise ... may feature as a communicational link by support­
ing the passing of often difficult or challenging messages ... heard to give 
form to the radically formless, creating space for the intensities of diversity, 
strangeness, and the unfamiliar" (LaBelle 2010:xxiii). By locating this space, 
LaBelle creates an echoing chamber for Henri Lefebvre's message in Critique 
of Everyday Life: 

It is then that consciousness of alienation-that strange awareness of 
the strange-liberates us, or begins to liberate us, from alienation. This 
is the truth. And at the moment of truth we are suddenly dis orientated 
by others and by ourselves. To look at things from an alien standpoint­
externally and from a reasonable distance-is to look at things truly. 

(Lefebvre 1991:20) 



luke Fischbeck 

References 

Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. 
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2009. The Radicant. New York: Lukas and Sternberg. 
Carter, Paul. 2004. "Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space." In Hearing 

Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann, 43-64. 
Oxford: Berg. 

Connor, Steven. 1997. The Modern Auditory 1. In Rewriting the Self Histories from the 
Renaissance to the Present, edited Roy Porter. London and New York: Routledge. 

DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Hilmes, Michele. 2005. Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter? 

American Quarterly 57(1): 249-259. 
LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise. New York and London: Continuum. 
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life. New York and London: Verso. 
Lefebvre, Henri. 1987. "The Everyday and Everydayness." Yale French Studies 73: 7-11. 
Toop, David. 2010. Sinister Resonances. New York and London: Continuum. 

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