See This Sound: Versprechungen von Bild und Ton / Promises in Sound and Vision (2010) [German/English]

“As the status of sound in art and music evolves and redefines itself, so too does sound art find new ways of describing its history. See This Sound compiles a large number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic “eye music” of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others.”

With essays by Helmut Draxler, Diedrich Diederichsen, Gabriele Jutz, Liz Kotz, Heidi Grundmann, Christian Höller, Dieter Daniels, and Manuela Ammer.

Edited by Cosima Rainer, Stella Rollig, Dieter Daniels and Manuela Ammer
Publisher Walther König, Cologne, 2010
ISBN 3865606830, 9783865606839
320 pages

Exhibition website and archive

PDF (19 MB, updated on 2021-7-19)

Alberto de Campo: Science by Ear: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sonifying Scientific Data (2009)

Sonification of Scientific Data is intrinsically interdisciplinary: It requires collaboration between experts in the respective scientific domains, in psychoacoustics, in artistic design of synthetic sound, and in working with appropriate programming environments. The SonEnvir project hosted at IEM Graz put this view into practice: in four domain sciences, sonification designs for current research questions were realised.

This dissertation contributes to sonification research in three aspects:

The body of sonification designs realised within the SonEnvir context is described, which may be reused in sonification research in different ways.

The software framework built with and for these sonification designs is presented, which supports fluid experimentation with evolving sonification designs.

A theoretical model for sonification design work, the Sonification Design Space Map, was synthesised based the analysis of this body of sonification designs (and a few selected others). This model allows systematic reasoning about the process of creating sonification designs, and provides concepts for analysing and categorising existing sonifications designs more systematically.

Dissertation
Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics – IEM, University for Music and Dramatic Arts Graz, February 2009
Supervisors: Robert Höldrich, Curtis Roads
211 pages

SonEnvir research project

PDF
View online (on Scribd.com, from the author)

Differences 22(2-3): The Sense of Sound (2011)

“Sound has given rise to many rich theoretical reflections, but when compared to the study of images, the study of sound continues to be marginalized. How is the “sense” of sound constituted and elaborated linguistically, textually, technologically, phenomenologically, and geologically, as well as acoustically? How is sound grasped as an object? Considering sound both within and beyond the scope of the human senses, contributors from literature, film, music, philosophy, anthropology, media and communication, and science and technology studies address topics that range from Descartes’s resonant subject to the gendering of hearing physiology in the nineteenth century, Cold War politics and the opera Nixon in China, sounds from the Mediterranean, the poetics of signal processing, and the acousmatic voice in the age of MP3s. In the interpretive challenges posed by voice, noise, antinoise, whispering, near inaudibility, and silence and in the frequent noncoincidence of emission and reception, sound confronts us with what might be called its inhuman qualities—its irreducibility to meaning, to communication, to information, and even to recognition and identification.”

Contributors: Caroline Bassett, Eugenie Brinkema, Iain Chambers, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, Mladen Dolar, Veit Erlmann, Evan Johnson, Christopher Lee, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, Dominic Pettman, Tara Rodgers, Nicholas Seaver, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne.

Special double-issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Guest edited by Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager
Publisher Duke University Press
ISSN 1040-7391
314 pages
via -end-

Publisher

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