Books and Videos
Video Resources
Visit the SoundGirls YouTube Channel for a wide range of videos on Audio. Find training, webinars, panels, and more.
SoundGirls Lending Library
SoundGirls members are able to check out a book from our library for 30 days. It is free for members.
How it works
Request one book at a time, SoundGirls will mail it to you in the domestic United States for free. In return, you will ship the book back to SoundGirls or mail it to the next member who has requested it.
If you have books on audio that you would like to donate – email us at soundgirls@soundgorls.org
See Books Currently Available and Request Books Here.
Recommended Reading
7 Things Every Live Sound Engineer Should Know
SoundGirls Co-Founder Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato has created a Free eBook called It covers some of the principles and ideas she has found to be most important when working in Live Sound, especially in mixing.
Top 30 Audio Engineering Blogs, News Websites & Newsletters To Follow in 2019
Strictly Educational
The Sound Reinforcement Handbook
The Book features information on both the audio theory involved and the practical applications of that theory, explaining everything from microphones to loudspeakers.
Live Sound Reinforcement
Excellent book to introduce beginners and HOW volunteers to live sound reinforcement. Readers will learn about sound as experts share their experiences, along with tips and tricks.
Sound Systems: Design and Optimization
Bob is thorough, complete, methodical, and passionate about the laws and facts of physics. He includes rules-of-thumb and cheat-sheets that will give you instant insight into the invisible.
Sound for the Stage
Patrick Finelli’s thorough manual covering all aspects of live and recorded sound for performance is a complete training course for anyone interested in working in the field of stage sound.
Mastering Audio: The Art and Science
Written by award-winning Bob Katz, Mastering Audio gives you a thorough introduction to the unique procedures and technical issues involved in mastering.
Acoustics and Psychoacoustics
Acoustics and Psychoacoustics gives you an essential grounding and understanding to how real music sounds behave in different spaces whether during a performance or a recording.
Field Recording Book Round Up
A selection of books and information on field recording by Creative Field Recording.
Professional Audio Reference
Pro audio reference book list
The Business
Tour:Smart: And Break the Band
From packing the right equipment to keeping enough gas in the tank to get home, every aspect of making a successful tour with a band is addressed in this comprehensive guide.
Welcome to the Music Business – You’re Fucked!
Get a free copy!
The Worst Gig
Everybody from Rush and The Sex Pistols to Owl City and Fitz & the Tantrums can be found in helpfully titled sections like Wrong Venue, Insane Fans, Dangerous Malfunctions, Nature’s Wrath, Violence and the self-explanatory Oops.
Sound Design Live: Build Your Career as a Sound Engineer
Women’s Issues / Women in Music
Kim Gordon: Girl in a Band
Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story—a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith’s Just Kids.
Alice Bag: Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story
The proximity of the East L.A. barrio to Hollywood is as close as a short drive on the 101 freeway, but the cultural divide is enormous. Born to Mexican-born and American-naturalized parents, Alicia Armendariz migrated a few miles west to participate in the free-range birth of the 1970s punk movement. Alicia adopted the punk name Alice Bag, and became lead singer for The Bags, early punk visionaries who starred in Penelope Spheeris’ documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.
Viv Albertine: Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
The guitarist for seminal female punk group The Slits recounts playing with Sid Vicious, touring with the Clash, dating Mick Jones, inspiring “Train in Vain,” and releasing her solo debut in 2012.
Patti Smith: Just Kids
InJust Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship.
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of Riot Grrrlthe radical feminist uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s and included incendiary punk bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. A dynamic chronicle not just a movement but an era, this is the story of a group of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet.
Cinderella’s Big Score
Cinderella’s Big Score celebrates the contributions of punk’s oft-overlooked female artists, explores the latent—and not so latent—sexism of indie rock (so often thought of as the hallowed ground of progressive movements), and tells the story of how these women created spaces for themselves in a sometimes limited or exclusionary environment. The indie music world is littered with females who have not only withstood the racket of punk’s intolerance, but have twisted our societal notions of femininity in knots. Raha focuses on the United States and England in the 70s and 80s, and illuminates how the seminal women of this time shaped the female rockers of the 90s and today. Groups profiled range from The Runaways, The Slits, and The Plasmatics to L7, Sleater-Kinney, and Le Tigre. The book includes women not often featured in “women in rock” titles, such as Exene Cervenka of X, Eve Libertine and Joy de Vivre of Crass, and Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps. Includes rare interviews and more than forty B&W photos.
The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era (Studies in Popular Music)
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new phenomenon emerged in UK popular music – female guitarists, bass-players, keyboard-players and drummers began playing in bands. Before this time, women’s presence in rock bands, with a few notable exceptions, had always been as vocalists. This sudden influx of female musicians into the male domain of rock music was brought about by the enabling ethic of punk rock (“anybody can do it!”) and by the impact of the Sex Discrimination Act. With the demise of the punk scene, interest in these musicians evaporated and other priorities became important to music audiences. This book investigates the social and commercial reasons why these women became lost from the rock music record, and rewrites this period of popular music history.
Other Music-Related Books
Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and it affects the human condition.
This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
The Rest is Noise, Listening to the 20th Century
A voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which for many people remains an obscure and forbidding world.
Lexicon of the Mouth – Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary
The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination.
Sonic Possible Worlds – Hearing the Continuum of Sound
In Sonic Possible Worlds, Voegelin proposes a new analytical framework that can access and investigate works across genres and times, enabling a comparative engagement where composers such as Henry Purcell and Nadia Boulanger encounter sound art works by Shilpa Gupta and Christina Kubisch and where the soundscape compositions of Chris Watson and Francisco López resound in the visual worlds of Louise Bourgeois.
Sound Unseen – Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice
The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of “acousmatics,” Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.
The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World
Trevor Cox is on a hunt for the sonic wonders of the world. A renowned expert who engineers classrooms and concert halls. Cox now revels in exotic noises—creaking glaciers, whispering galleries, stalactite organs, musical roads, humming dunes, seals that sound like alien angels, and a Mayan pyramid that chirps like a bird. With forays into archaeology, neuroscience, biology, and design, Cox explains how sound is made and altered by the environment, how our body reacts to peculiar noises, and how these mysterious wonders illuminate sound’s surprising dynamics in everyday settings—from your bedroom to the opera house. The Sound Book encourages us to become better listeners in a world dominated by the visual and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony all around us.