Karin Bijsterveld and Jose van Dijck, eds. 2009. Sound 
Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural 
Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 

Reviewed by Geeta Dayal 

R. Murray Schafer coined the term "sound souvenirs" in The Soundscape 
(1994 [1977]: 240) to describe what the editors of the eponymous book 
Sound Souvenirs describe as "endangered sounds, such as the sounds of 
pre-industrial life, that could be captured by recording technologies or 
stored in archives, and thus remembered after their extinction" (2009:13). 
Schafer himself, however, only casually mentioned the phrase in tandem 
with the more predominant concept of "sound marks; , the sonic equivalents 
oflandmarks (1977: 1 0,239). Subsequent scholarship also did not explicitly 
address sound souvenirs as it did other ideas from Schafer's work, such as 
"schizophonia;' or the splitting of a sound from its source (e.g., Feld 1994, 
Truax, 2001, Sterne 2006). Over 40 years later, editors Karin Bijsterveld 
and Jose van Dijck build on The Soundscape's lineage, as interpreted and 
expanded by Steven Feld (1994), Thomas Porcello (2005), and other works 
that foreground sound technologies as central to cultural memory; they 
argue in their introduction that the "sound souvenirs" lining our shelves 
still have yet to receive significant scholarly attention, and this book at­
tempts to address that gap. Its contributors explore the cultural practices 
of archiving, collecting, resuscitating, and restoring past sounds in order to 
probe the links between sound and memory; this includes examining the 
ephemera surrounding recorded sound-reel-to-reel tapes, vinyl records, 
and so on-along with the sound-making devices themselves, old and new, 
from transistor radios to cassette recorders to iPods. 

The ambitious collection encompasses twelve chapters in four 
sections-"Storing Sound," "Auditory Nostalgia," "Technostalgia," and 
"Earwitnessing"-each attending to different aspects of the connections 
between memory, cultural practices, and audio technologies. The first sec­
tion, "Storing Sound," explores the history of archiving sound recordings, 
from the supposed permanence of digital file storage to the practice of 
creating mix tapes. "Auditory Nostalgia" explores the connection between 
memory and portable audio technologies such as radios, Walkmans, and 
iPods. "Technostalgia," refers to the nostalgia for the sound of antiquated 
technologies: that special analog amplifier, that vintage 1970s synthesizer. 
"Earwitnessing;' the final section, is titled after another word Schafer de­
fined (1994 [1977]: 2 72), the aural counterpart to being an eyewitness; the 

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two chapters in this section investigate sound memories of World War II, 
particularly the memories of German survivors of the Nazi period, told 
through sound. 

Bijsterveld and van Dijck have assembled an impressive stock of con­
tributors from the fields of science and technology studies and communica­
tion studies, many of who specialize in sound studies (including Jonathan 
Sterne, Trevor Pinch, Michael Bull, and Hans-Joachim Braun). Only one is a 
musicologist by training, Timothy D. Taylor-dually an ethnomusicologist 
known for his work on global circulations of recorded music-who writes 
brilliantly here on performance and nostalgia in the oldies doo-wop circuit. 
Bijsterveld herself is one of the leading scholars in sound studies; she is the 
author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Problems of Noise in 
the Twentieth Century (2008) and the paper "The Diabolical Symphony of 
the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and 
North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900-40" (2001). 

Jonathan Sterne, offering a taster of his highly anticipated second book, 
MP3: The Meaning of a Format and a follow- up to hi" 2006 article "The MP3 
as Cultural Artifact;' writes on the paradox of digital preservation: "Although 
digital technology allows for unprecedented ease in the transfer and stock­
piling of recordings, the current condition of plenitude is something of an 
illusion" (64). The minute a hard drive fails, data is lost-completely and 
most likely irretrievably. Analog recordings may fade, vinyl records and 
magnetic tape may get damaged and dusty, but a hard drive of MP3s can 
be lost immediately and forever, and the life span of these digital recordings 
is far more fleeting than we think. 

In "Taking Your Favorite Sound Along: Portable Audio Technologies 
for Mobile Music Listening," Heike Weber focuses on the use of portable 
radios in the 1950s-60s and the emergence of the Walkman during the 1970s 
and 1980s in West Germany. Weber's well-researched contribution brings 
a number of intriguing statistics to the fore. The increase of portable radio 
sales in the 1950s, she writes, "demonstrated West Germany's transforma­
tion from a postwar economy of scarcity and tight household budgets to a 
mass consumer society with increasing consumption, leisure and mobility" 
(71). "Mobile music listening" is not what we may mean it to be today; the 
average West German "portable" radio in the 1950s boasted high sound 
quality, but tipped the scales at up to five kilograms (71). Listening to 
the radio back then tended to be a communal activity; by the time of the 
Walkman in the 1970s, many West Germans saw headphone listening-and 
the individualized consumption it portrayed-as rather odd. The "wiring" 
of headphones to individual listeners was even sometimes compared to a 
medical transfusion (77 -78). 



Geeta Dayal 

Timothy Taylor's chapter on nostalgia for doo-wop, a form of American 
"oldies" music, proves another striking contribution. Taylor begins with 
anecdotal observations from his visits to a small town on the Jersey Shore 
where the genre thrives to this day. Doo-wop encapsulated youthful inno­
cence and teenage passion-Taylor quotes the lyrics to The Penguins's classic 
"Earth Angel" to illustrate this-but as compelling of a fantasy as it was, the 
music had a very brief shelf life. It was quickly replaced by rock 'n' roll, a 
genre with more "adult" themes, as the 1950s progressed. Doo-wop's rapid 
rise and fall also helped to make the genre the domain of rabid collectors; 
Taylor quotes Jeffrey Melnick, who argues that "doo-wop was transformed 
into a collector's artifact more quickly, more decisively, and more zealously 
than perhaps any other sub genre of American music" (Melnick 1997:137, 
97). Despite its status as a recorded artifact, doo-wop plays out its nostalgia 
today, interestingly, through live performances-a "technology of nostalgia, 
or prosthetic memory," as Taylor writes, where performers in these revival 
groups and listeners act out the "passions of youth and the promise of racial 
harmony" (106). Continuing to probe the connections between doo-wop 
and race in the 1950s, Taylor contends that the genre articulated promises of 
integration and optimism about race. "This was a unique cultural moment 
in American history," he argues, "where there was perhaps more crossover 
by African American musicians to white audiences than at any other point 
in American history" (101). 

Trevor Pinch and David Reinecke's chapter, "Technostalgia: How Old 
Gear Lives on in New Music," examines the musicians and collectors who 
value vintage synthesizers, such as the Moog Minimoog, and bygone guitars, 
so much so that a process known as "relicing," in which new guitars are 
made to look and sound aged, has become popular. Pinch already has a 
good deal of experience with technostalgia; in his book Analog Days (2004) 
with Frank Trocco, he traced the history and impact of the cultish Moog 
synthesizer, along with the ARP, Buchla, and EMS synthesizers. In Sound 
Souvenirs, he and Reinecke focus on interviews with four musicians who 
all profess a fondness for old gear, such as analog synths, vintage amps, 
and classic Les Paul guitars. But what is striking here is that all four of the 
musicians are men, several of whom hold positions in academic depart­
ments. Do, for instance, female artists share a similar fascination with old 
'70s analog technology? Do they find value, in Pinch and Reinecke's words, 
in "the uniqueness of analog sound, its imprecisions and imperfections, 
and the noise it produces, which [John, one of the musicians profiled] also 
thinks evokes human emotion" (l65)? What about musicians of different 
cultures, races, ages, and ethnicities? In its small sample of examined cases, 
Pinch and Reinecke's contribution raises further questions by its exclusivity 
and the nature of its omissions. 

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One of the most revelatory pieces is Carolyn Birdsall's chapter, 
"Earwitnessing: Sound Memories of the Nazi Period." For her contribution, 
Birdsall interviewed several German survivors of the Nazi era living in 
Dusseldorf. While many survivors have been repeatedly asked about their 
visual memories, few have been specifically questioned regarding their 
memories of sounds. The relationship between trauma and visual images 
has received considerable scholarly attention (e.g., Bennett 2005, Kraft 2006, 
Katalin 2007), but the connections between sound and trauma are less well 
explored (outside the realm of music therapy and medical literature ). During 
Birdsall's extensive oral history interviews, she observed that her interviewees 
would often jump out of their chairs or raise their arms to demonstrate how 
they were forced to perform the "Heil Hitler" salute; some began to stamp 
their feet while others would begin singing the lyrics to the national anthem. 
Birdsall uses the cultural geographer Ben Anderson's framework on the role 
of sound in the embodied process of remembering, with its three categories: 
"habit memory;' "intentional remembering;' and "involuntary remember­
ing" (2004). Of her explorations into these three forms of remembering, 
the involuntary variety is the most striking. Birdsall dwells on the nature of 
unanticipated memory through this lens of Anderson's concept and Marcel 
Proust's related idea of "memo ire involuntaire," (176). One interviewee still 
panics and clutches her chest whenever she hears sirens; another said that 
she can only speak in Plattdeutsch, a German dialect she has not used since 
World War II, when she experiences a shock today (177). The elderly subjects 
that Birdsall studied had difficulty with their "sound memories," mixing the 
sounds of the past with the sounds of the present. "While the sounds associ­
ated with bombings, such as sirens, were referred to as memories located in 
the past," Birdsall writes, "the actual event of the bombing was acted out as 
occurring in the present" (177-178). 

Sound Souvenirs is an ambitious volume, with a vision, depth, and 
expansiveness that stretches far beyond its mere 218 pages. Uniting the four 
disparate sections under the umbrella of "sound souvenirs" feels unwieldy 
and somewhat arbitrary at points. This collection is really four separate 
books in one; each of the four sections could have easily been expanded into 
its own anthology. The book could also benefit from expanding its scope 
beyond Western Europe and the United States. Overall, Sound Souvenirs is an 
admirable effort in the rapidly growing field of sound studies, anticipating 
several entry points for further exploration. 



Geeta Dayal 

References 

Anderson, Ben. 2004. "Recorded Music and Practices of Remembering." Social and Cultural 

Geography 5: 3-20. 
Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise 

in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
~. 2001. "The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of 

Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900-40." Social 
Studies of Science 31 (l): 37-70. 

Feld, Steven. 1994. "From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: The Discourses and Practices of 
'World Music' and 'World Beat.'" In Music Grooves, Charles Keil and Steven Feld. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press. 

Melnick, Jeffrey. 1997. '''Story Untold: The Black Men and White Sounds of Doo-Wop." In 
Whiteness: Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill. New York: New York University Press. 

Pinch, Trevor and Frank Trocco. 2004. Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog 
Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Schafer, R. Murray. 1994 [1977]. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning 
of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. 

Sterne, Jonathan. 2006. "The MP3 As Cultural Artifact." New Media and Society 8(5): 825-
842. 

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