Noël, Jean-Sébastien <br/><br/>
The cultural history of musical circulations in the light of sound studies: Theoretical reflections and practical considerations 

 -  2019.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 100 
<br/><br/> The academic field of sound studies centers around the socioeconomical, political and cultural dimensions of the production of sounds (and not only in its technical aspects) and it has challenged historical practices, hypotheses and territories for about 15 years. While some researchers from the field aim at freeing sound from music, this paper suggests changing this perspective so as to assess how useful these academic works have been for the historical inquiry into musical sociabilities and circulations. New objects and social spaces have been analysed through new critical approaches and with the use of interdisciplinary methodologies by historians, acousticians and musicologists who believed their field of expertise was not limited to music scores. From historian Emily Thompson, who studied the scientific conception of acoustic spaces in architectural innovation, to musicologist Jonathan Sterne, who has researched the cultural origins of sound reproduction, they all consider sound to be inseparable from its historicized social stakes. Even the very concept of “soundscape” has to be viewed through a critical lens because it is ideologically charged. Writing a history of sound raises questions about the social history of listening that should also be studied from the perspective of musical acoustics. Finally, the field of sound studies invites historians to rethink and appraise the process of creation of sound archives by combining the contributions of Science and Technology studies in regard to sound (re)production with the specific methods of the historical inquiry in order to analyse testimonies from the “audible past”.