Gascia Ouzounian, Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2020), ISBN: 978-0-262-04478-3 (hb).

Sound Studies as a discipline is replete with theories on the relationship between sound and space, and while many point to certain key historical anecdotes to ground far-reaching theories on project-specific examples, few have attempted a historical account of acoustic and auditory spatiality with such specificity and coherence as Gascia Ouzounian. Stereophonica contributes to a growing field of research on this intersection, traversing examples from the nineteenth century to the present day. Using the key concepts of propagation, reflection, and projection, Ouzounian begins with the origins of the ‘binaural listener’. This category of scientific listener explored auditory space through amyriad of technical innovations in stereophonic audition and projection from medical tools such as the stethoscope to military technologies for sound detection. Stereophonica is roughly divided into two parts: the first examining key intersections between technological innovation and sound theory, and the second surveying a number of artistic practices from mediated broadcast to recent sound art and site-specific installation works, weaving what the author describes as ‘the improbable path from studies of auditory space perception in the nineteenth century to the work of contemporary artists who reveal and reorient urban spaces through sound’ (14). As is necessary for a brief survey with such a wide historical lens, Ouzounian picks key historical episodes that transformed the understanding of sound and space, spanning engineering, warfare, theatre, industry, and urban design. Ending with contemporary uses of this established toolkit of theories, Ouzounian positions the modernist attempt to document, map, plan, and rationalize sound against the social, political, and cultural meanings that the title of the study evokes. As was often the central conflict in modernist rationalization of auditory space, the study and application of sound’s effects could never be removed from the discursive social and political understandings of space – one could argue that the modernist attempt to do so in fact created ground for oppositional studies in contemporary practice. In the first half of Stereophonica, Ouzounian walks us through a cabinet of nineteenthand early twentieth-century curiosities in sound audition and reproduction, beginning with binaural listening devices such as the differential stethoscope and aural analogues andmoving on to the stereoscope such as Anton Steinhauser’s Homophone (1879) and Silvanus P. Thompson’s Pseudophone (1879), devices that aided in theorizing binaural perception.