‘Explode all our metaphors’ – on the potential of sound in media and audience studies. An interview with Martin Barker

In this interview Martin Barker discusses his recent studies concerning audience experiences of organised sound. Complicating a multi-sensory approach, he engages with a number of contested notions in the field, such as liveness or visualisation, and suggests that empirical work is necessary to better understand what they mean for the audiences – but methodologically, such empirical work is not without challenges. Reviewing a number of interdisciplinary publications, Barker argues that research of sound can help open up the field of audience studies, but to do that, we need a careful, historical analysis of sound audiences across time and place.