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Lorraine Plourde, Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019), ISBN: 978-0-8195-7883-9 (hb), ISBN: 978-0-8195-7884-6 (pb), and ISBN: 978-0-8195-7885-3 (ebook).

Lorraine Plourde’s Tokyo Listening is a remarkable contribution to the ever-expanding literature in Sound Studies. With a focus on acousmatic sound, affect, and attunement, Plourde argues that the ‘urban sensorium’ allows ‘noises and ambient sounds [to] serve as the foundation upon which listeners experience the city’ (3). In doing so, she rightly presents Tokyo in particular as a sound-saturated sociality with varied sensory input at every turn (3). Tokyo is a particularly potent urban centre in which to locate this study, with its vibrant personality and innovative design. Nevertheless, long understood as a visually impactful city, past studies of Tokyo have neglected the role of sound in the overall sensory experience. Plourde, however, highlights specific examples of the ways in which sound shapes encounters in three different sites: Offsite, for intense listening and attunement; classical cafés, for relaxation, nostalgia, and loud public listening; and background music (BGM) in multiple locations to increase productivity, build community, and generate feelings of happiness. Plourde’s work is not just an ethnography of these three sites caught in a specific moment in time but rather an analysis of the interconnectedness of Tokyo’s urban soundscape and myriad listening practices that shape how inhabitants engage with the world. We may take the act of listening for granted – but the Sound Studies work of authors such as Plourde challenges us as designers, musicians, thinkers, and active participants in the making of sound in cities to think more deeply about hearing and listening. Plourde does so by first calling attention to the complex ways ‘listeners attune themselves to the sounds and noises of the city . . . [revealing] an array of techniques for both listening to and in Tokyo’ (2). Distinct urban atmospheres are enhanced by affectively managed sonic-sensory experiences as listeners ‘relax, listen, read, shop, and work’ (2). Plourde thus focuses on a spectrum of public as opposed to private sound: ‘a type of listening wherein listeners are fully exposed to sound in public spaces such as department stores, cafés, offices, and music venues, rather than shutting out sound with private mobile technologies’ (3). Listeners