The developing discourse around visual studies, visual culture, and image literacy assumes the primacy of the image in an increasingly multi-modal, multi-media experience of our daily technological experience. The scopic regimes of modernity entrained the twentieth century to assume the primacy of vision, rendering the haptic, olfactory, and auditory modes mere marginalia as the critical interrogation of the power of vision and the image has expanded to its current state.
Media studies has had some sound apologists:
-Walter Ong: Orality and Literacy
-Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers: The Global Village, Transformations in World Life and Media in the 20th Century
-Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
-R. Murray Schafer: Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of Our World
and new a new branch of media studies focusing on sound has developed:
-Kaja Silverman: The Acoustic Mirror, The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis in Cinema
-Siegfried Zielinski: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means
-Michel Chion: Audiovision, Sound on Screen
-Michael Bull: Sound Moves, iPod Culture and Urban Experience
-Lars Nyre: Sound Media
A number of useful edited collections are good place to start for those interested in a basic familiarity:
-Michael Schmidt’s edited compendium: Philosophy of Media Sounds
-Michael Bull and Les Back: The Auditory Culture Reader
-Mark Smith: Hearing History, A Reader
So perhaps, by acknowledging that our contemporary experience of interaction, graphic, communication, and game design occur through technologies that are increasingly touched, smelled, and heard we can integrate rather than separate our senses, heightening our sensitivity to the multi-media world we’ve inhabited since before there were technologies to distract and delight…