Michel Chion: Film, a Sound Art (2003/2009)

“French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise—it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema.

The first half of Film, A Sound Art considers developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. The second half explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. With restless inventiveness, Chion develops a rhetoric that describes the effects of audio-visual combinations, forcing us to rethink sound film. He claims, for example, that the silent era (which he terms “deaf cinema”) did not end with the advent of sound technology but continues to function underneath and within later films. Expanding our appreciation of cinematic experiences ranging from Dolby multitrack in action films and the eerie tricycle of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, A Sound Art showcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.”

First published as Art sonore, le cinema, 2003

Translated by Claudia Gorbman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2009
ISBN 0231137761, 9780231137768
536 pages
via johnsonleow

Reviews: Knakkergaard (MedieKultur, 2010), Whittington (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2010), Jaeckle (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (Index missing, 58 MB, no OCR, updated on 2023-3-9)

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

PDF

Steve McCaffery, bpNichol (eds.): Sound Poetry: A Catalogue (1978)

For the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival in Toronto, Canada, October 1978.

With texts and works by Steve McCaffery, Paula Claire, Greta Monach, Charlie Morrow, Jackson Maclow, Bob Cobbing, Bernard Heidsieck, Paul Dutton, Sten Hanson, Henri Chopin, R. Murray Schafer, Owen Sound, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Gibbs, Raoul Duguay, Steve Ruppenthal, Earle Birney, Lawrence Upton, Dick Higgins, Sean O’Huigin, Ann Southam, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Larry Wendt, bpNichol, Cris Cheek, P.C. Fencott, Ilmar Laaban, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Bill Griffiths and Ake Hodell.

Publisher Underwhich Editions, Toronto, 1978
112 pages
via Juan Angel Italiano

Extra information and resources related to the catalogue (via Danny Snelson, added on 2014-1-20)

PDF
McCaffery’s introduction on UbuWeb