Sound

The "sonic turn" in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness thatsight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The backgroundbuzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning into thisincessant 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 andnature, the everyday and cultural otherness, technological effects and psychological states. Newperspectives on sound have generated a wave of scholarship in musicology, cultural studies, and thesocial sciences. But the equally important rise of sound in the arts since 1960 has so far beensparsely documented. This volume is the first sourcebook to provide, through original criticalwritings and artists' statements, a genealogy of sonic pathways into the arts, philosophicalreflections on the meanings of noise and silence, dialogues between art and music, investigations ofthe role of listening and acoustic space, and a comprehensive survey of sound works by internationalartists from the avant-garde era to the present.

Caleb Kelly is a New Zealand-born writer, curator, and producer in the fields of experimental music, sound arts, and performance. A lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, he is the author of Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (MIT Press, 2009).