Sounding Objects

Often abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product. Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced vocabulary for reflecting on their own art and its roles in courtly life, the civic arena, and salon society. Poets not only depicted the world of musical practice but also appropriated it, using musical instruments figuratively to establish their literary identities. Drawing on music treatises and archival sources as well as poems, paintings, and engravings, this unique study aims to enrich our understanding of the interplay of poetry, music, and art in this period, and highlights the importance of musical materiality to Renaissance culture.

Sound Art offers the first comprehensive introduction to sound art written for undergraduate students. Bridging and blending aspects of the visual and sonic arts, modern sound art first emerged in the early 20th century and has grown into a thriving and varied field. In 13 thematic chapters, this book enables students to clearly grasp both the concepts behind this unique area of art, and its history and practice. Each chapter begins with an exploration of key ideas and theories, followed by an in-depth discussion of selected relevant works, both classic and current. Drawing on a broad, diverse range of examples, and firmly interdisciplinary, this book will be essential reading for anyone studying or teaching the theory, history, appreciation, or practice of sound art.

Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in the forefront of contemporary sonic discussions but also underscore auditory experience as fundamental to sound as a critical enterprise. In so doing, they offer exciting considerations of sound within and beyond its role in meaning, communication, and information and an illuminatingly original theoretical overview of the field of sound studies itself. Contributors. Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, John Dack, Veit Erlmann, Brian Kane, Jairo Moreno, John Mowitt, Pooja Rangan, Gavin Steingo, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne, David Toop

Sound art has long been resistant to its own definition. Emerging from a liminal space between movements of thought and practice in the twentieth century, sound art has often been described in terms of the things that it is understood to have left behind: a space between music, fine art, and performance. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art surveys the practices, politics, and emerging frameworks of thought that now define this previously amorphous area of study. Throughout the Handbook, artists and thinkers explore the uses of sound in contemporary arts practice. Imbued with global perspectives, chapters are organized in six overarching themes of Space, Time, Things, Fabric, Senses and Relationality. Each theme represents a key area of development in the visual arts and music during the second half of the twentieth century from which sound art emerged. By offering a set of thematic frameworks through which to understand these themes, this Handbook situates constellations of disparate thought and practice into recognized centers of activity.

Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.

In this delightful, phenomenological account, Kittelson writes in lively pursuit of the language of hearing, an ode to the persistent primacy of the ear. It's right here, she says, just around the corner from our noses.

Sounding New Media examines the long-neglected role of sound and audio in the development of new media theory and practice, including new technologies and performance art events, with particular emphasis on sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Antonin Artaud, and Char Davies. She utilizes sound's intangibility to study ideas about embodiment (or its lack) in art and technology as well as fears about technology and the so-called "post-human." Dyson argues that the concept of "immersion" has become a path leading away from aesthetic questions about meaning and toward questions about embodiment and the physical. The result is an insightful journey through the new technologies derived from electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing, toward the creation of an aesthetic and philosophical framework for considering the least material element of an artwork, sound.