Review: The Sound Book

July 8, 2021

Today I finished listening to The Sound Book by Trevor Cox, and the general statement I would use to describe this book is casually informational. It has a lot to take in and communicates it at a level that could be reasonably understood by any adult, meaning that anybody who knows even just a little about acoustic sciences (e.g. me) will find their knowledge refreshed several times throughout this book. I approached this as a recommendation from my acoustics professor to get a more detailed perspective of acoustics, and while it did broaden my knowledge of the subject, I'm not sure if it's going to help in my research very much due to the very non-technical aspect.

The book explores some complex sound systems, such as brief explanations of how the brain processes sound signals, as well as more general life lessons, such as how we should be more perceptive to noise when sightseeing as there can be as much joy found in the sonic terrain of a location as there is in the visual. The majority of the book is Cox traveling to distant (or very, very close, as he mentions Washington several times) locations on a search for what he calls "sonic wonders," which are described as places where sound is interesting to him. These range from Mayan pyramids to Antarctica to the sewers of London, with a bit of a bias towards Europe, since that's where Cox lives and grew up.

He opens the book with explaining how it is difficult to describe sound in any way other than in relation to more familiar sounds, and that's basically what he does throughout the book. This made it difficult to be as immersed or impressed as I possibly could, and I think it would be cool if (since this was an audiobook) the recordings he took were spliced in with the audiobook readings. Some of these sounds can be found on his website (http://www.sonicwonders.org/), and a similar project by Linus Lee does the same, but with crowd or city noises as opposed to "wonders" (https://soundsfromplaces.surge.sh/).

Overall I would say that it is a good read or listen if you have about 10 hours of free time (less if you read it, it's 300 pages) and any interest in anything regarding sound (archaeologically, neuroscientifically, architecturally, biologically, etc.). I would recommend skimming through the chapters and reading one that interests you if you don't want to spend all that time, they're about an hour each (9 chapters) and range from his journey seeking the sounds of spirituality at a Buddhist retreat and a sensory deprivation container to his journey to the most reverberant place on earth (that we know of), where a gunshot reverberates for about two minutes.