Ear | Wave | Event, 2: Listening? (2015)

“Christoph Cox [stated at a recent conference on ‘The Politics of Listening’] that artists’ projects must not simply be taken as illustrative of or addenda to theory, but that they propose other ways for us to listen. Coming from vastly different positions, the authors in [this] issue offer precisely such generative perspectives on listening and listening subjects from the privileged viewpoint of the practitioner. It is NOT that musicians should be the only ones to talk about sound, but that there is nevertheless a value in that specialist knowledge of music nerds who spend their days dealing with audio minutiae and the history thereof. A value which is also not to be confused with the positivist musicological valorization of such detail, but instead, a value that might still open out into an authentic interdisciplinarity.

The contributors to Issue 2 face the immense material complexity of listening head on – physically, technically, formally, politically, socially. Their contributions continually orbit the question, ‘What is Listening?,’ all the while deftly dodging all manner of all too common platitudes.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Lawrence English, Bill Dietz & Lawrence English, Brenda Hutchinson, Eric Laska, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Paolo Javier, Christian von Borries, Anna Bromley & Michael Fesca, J Zevin & Jim Ellis, Geoff Mullen, Matana Roberts, and Marc Sabat.

Edited by Bill Dietz and Woody Sullender, April 2015

HTML/PDF articles

Klangkunst (1996) [German]

Catalogue for the landmark sound art festival, Sonambiente – Festival für Hören und Sehen, held in August-September 1996 in Berlin.

The festival, “was part of the Academy of Arts’ tricentennial celebration and presented the most comprehensive survey to date of contemporary international sound art. During the four weeks of that festival, some 50,000 visitors experienced works by more than 100 participating artists at more than 20 venues in Berlin’s Mitte district.” (source)

Edited by Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Helga de la Motte-Haber
Publisher Prestel, Munich, 1996
ISBN 3791316990, 9783791316994
303 pages
via VP

Festival website

WorldCat

PDF (69 MB, no OCR)
Video documentary (50 min, MOV, 115 MB), English transcript (PDF, both links updated on 2019-1-3)

For more on sound art see Monoskop wiki

Brian Kane: Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014)

“Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.

Sound Unseen explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, “acousmatic” was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete music Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer’s ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives-historical, cultural, philosophical and musical-and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases-from Bayreuth to Kafka’s “Burrow,” Apollinaire to Zizek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of 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.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2014
ISBN 9780199347841
318 pages

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF, PDF (5 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)