Sound

The "sonic turn" in recent art reflects a wider cultural
awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of
contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds
increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning into this incessant auditory stimulus, some
of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural, and
political resonance of sound. In tandem with recent experimental music and
technology, art has opened up to hitherto excluded dimensions of noise, silence, and
the act of listening. Artists working with sound have engaged in new forms of
aesthetic encounter with the city and nature, the everyday and cultural otherness,
technological effects and psychological states. New perspectives on sound have
generated a wave of scholarship in musicology, cultural studies, and the social
sciences. But the equally important rise of sound in the arts since 1960 has so far
been sparsely documented. This volume is the first sourcebook to provide, through
original critical writings and artists' statements, a genealogy of sonic pathways
into the arts, philosophical reflections on the meanings of noise and silence,
dialogues between art and music, investigations of the role of listening and
acoustic space, and a comprehensive survey of sound works by international artists
from the avant-garde era to the present.