Studies Fits into the

The proliferation of PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones with various added features has already changed our experience of the world, media, mediation, and sound. A mediated version of the world now fits into the palms of our hands. These devices are also potentially the site of crucial questions explored by sound studies and critical theory more generally, questions that overlap and intertwine, impinging upon each other and constituting a conceptual framework that is to my mind both the past and the future of sound studies. As always, the critical theorising of academia can help us to understand the daily lived experience of an increasingly mediated world. It can provide new perspectives and cause us to reflect upon that which might otherwise be taken for granted. We often devote our intellectual labour to what our neighbours and even our students merely encounter unre-flectively. What might at first seem trivial – for example the sound a handheld device makes when summoning its owner, a.k.a. a ringtone – i