Sounds of the City opens up a new area in sociological and urban studies: the aural experience of the social, mediated through mobile technologies of communication. In this innovative new study, Michael Bull argues that contemporary urban culture is witnessing a major social transformation in how people communicate in key areas of everyday life. Where in earlier times the experience of sound was collective and relatively fixed, we now increasingly carry our own privatized sound world with us as we move. The implications of this for notions of social cohesion are considerable. Similarly, this method of investigating urban relations opens up fascinating lines of speculation on the new sanctuary of private experience, arrived at through the Walkman and the loss of the chance encounters of the street in favour of a chosen and narrower set of social relations created by the car and the phone.