
Sonic Time Machines
Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity
Wolfgang Ernst(Author)
Amsterdam University Press
Published on 25. April 2016
Book
Hardback
184 pages
978-90-8964-949-2 (ISBN)
Description
Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.
Reviews / Votes
"The devotion to method in Sonic Time Machines is impressive, and one encounters it without even opening the book, as the cover - adorned with wave form - is an oscillogram and spectrogram representing a sound file of the author articulating SONIC TIME MACHINES. One wouldn't expect anything less from Ernst, whose intellectual trajectory and work has been to constitute that which he calls media archaeology. Unlike his other texts, however, Sonic Time Machines attends to this conceptual arrangement more directly. The cover represents one of the key strengths of the book: Sonic Time Machines is itself an act of media archaeology, the wave form serving as a background diagram under the title of the book, capturing the combination of method and theory that finds itself ever-present in the pages of the volume." - Review Essay To the Technical Media Themselves, Aidan Erasmus, University of the Western Cape, Kronos 43- "Sonic Time Machines offers many highly original and provoking insights that will undoubtedly contribute greatly to contemporary media archaeology and, regardless of Ernst's own reservations, toward the field of sound studies." - Journal of Sonic Studies
- "Sonic Time Machines offers highly original and stimulating insight into a media and techonocultural theory that is developed through sound and sonic articulations." - Jens Gerit Papenburg, Twentieth-Century Music
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academic
Illustrations
0 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
449 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-8964-949-2 (9789089649492)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
approx. 12/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€67.30
Not yet published

E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download

E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€60.49
Available for download

E-Book
04/2016
Amsterdam University Press
€191.00
Available for download
Person
Wolfgang Ernst is full professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.
Content
Part I: DEFINITIONS OF SONICITY AND THE SONIC TIME MACHINE INTRODUCTION: ON 'SONICITY' BEEING AS 'STIMMUNG' SONIC 'RE-PRESENCING' THE SONIC COMPUTER Part II: CULTURAL SOUNDINGS AND THEIR ENGINEERING RESONANCE OF SIREN SONGS: EXPERIMENTING WITH CULTURAL SONICITY TEXTUAL SONICITY. TECHNOLOGIZING ORAL POETRY Part III: TECHNO-SONICITY AND ITS BEEING-IN-TIME HISTORY OR RESONANCE? FROM SOUND SIGNAL TO ALPHANUMERIC SYMBOL RESCUED FROM THE ARCHIVE: ARCHAEONAUTICS OF SOUND SONIC ANALYTICS WORKS CITED ENGLISH NON-ENGLISH INDEX