Dr Martyn Smith

My latest research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound and the history of technology in Japan and Asia.

I am particularly interested in the ways in which sound was perceived, hierarchized, regulated, manipulated, and given meaning differently in different places and at different times.

Sound, its perception, reception and even consumption has worked throughout history to shape and effect gender, racial and national identities.

In Asia, the understanding of sound is also marked by political, social and cultural transformations shaped by colonial and post-colonial experiences.

I am interested in how the study of sound helps to expose some of the core issues and processes driving changes in technology, the environment, politics, aesthetics, cultural and social relations in Asia.

I am a founding member of the Asian Sound Culture Studies and Modernity Project. This is a large multi-year project and, together with colleagues based in Tokyo and the British Library, I am currently editing a collection of papers looking at sound culture and change across Asia since the late 19th Century.

The project explores the nature of modern sound in Asia to provide a perspective that decentres the 'West' and offers a broader consideration of the nature of sound in the process of modernity in Asia.

My long-standing research interests cover national identity, nationalism, gender, the mass media and consumer society in Japan and East Asia.

My recent book-Mass Media Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan-examined the transformation of nationalism and national identity in connection to the rise of consumer society during the 1950s and 1960s.

I am currently working on an article examining masculinity and consumerism in Japan in the global context of the 1960s which completes research I have been carrying out on the magazine Heibon Punch- considered the first men’s lifestyle magazine in Japan (founded in 1964) and neglected in academic considerations of gender and popular culture in postwar Japan.