Book review: Sporting sounds: relationships between sport and music

Mike Higgins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Sporting sounds: relationships between sport and music', edited by Anthony Bateman, John Bale (Routledge, 2009).

Roland Barthes famously wanted a ‘history of looking’ in an increasingly hyper-visual world, and the increasingly intensive and sophisticated work on visuality in the history of sport has been one result. But listening is important too, and there has been a growing literature on the anthropology, psychology and sociology of sensual experience in the last two decades. Back in 1996 the cultural historian Peter Bailey made an earnest plea for historians to make good what he saw as ‘a glaring omission’ in failing to give appropriate attention to study of societal ‘soundscapes’, and more recently interest in what are now sometimes pretentiously described as ‘auditory cultures’ or ‘historical acoustemologies’ has intensified. Even so, studies of the complex relationship between sport and music have hitherto, as Bateman and Bale point out, been found only in a ‘scattered literature’. They argue that there has been no ‘substantial text that reviewed and exemplified the ways in which music and sport are related’ (xiii). This collection is an intriguing attempt to open up what remains a major gap in the field. It would be really useful if the wider connections between sport and sound implied by the initial part of the title could be addressed in a later work.