The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art

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.

Jane Grant is an award-winning artist. She was co-creator of The Fragmented Orchestra with John Matthias and Nick Ryan, winner of the PRSF New Music Award in 2008. Her artwork Ghost was premiered at ISEA Istanbul 2011. Plasticity, a collaborative work with John Matthias, Kin, and Nick Ryan was at the BFI, onedotzero festival, and Google Campus, London. Grant, alongside Matthias, was commissioned to create the sonic artwork Fathom. Grant has recently been developing artworks in AR and immersive environments resulting in her new work Between Us with Magic Leap. Her current artworks are about desire, astrophysics, and haunting, including How to Disappear Completely.

John Matthias is an award-winning musician and composer and is currently Head of Research at dbs-i, an innovation lab in sound and music. As Associate Professor at The University of Plymouth, UK for 15 years, he was one of 14 PIs on the $e4.1 million EU Marie Curie Project 'Cognovo', which explored Cognitive Innovation from an interdisciplinary perspective and he has also initiated funded projects with The Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, EPSRC and The PRS for Music Foundation. He has released seven albums via Accidental, Ninja Tune, Nonclassical, Village Green, Sony and Welfare State. He has collaborated with many artists including Radiohead (The Bends) and Coldcut (Man in a Garage) and has had his music remixed by many artists including Thom Yorke, Matthew Herbert and Jem Finer (The Pogues). In 2008 he won the UK PRS Foundation New Music Award (The 'Turner Prize for Music') with Jane Grant and Nick Ryan for 'The Fragmented Orchestra' which led to the development of The Neurogranular Sampler Audio Unit and the 'Plasticity' sound installation at the BFI and Google Campus Building, London. He has performed Internationally at many venues including The Royal Opera House London, The Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Le Poisson Rouge (New York City) and has contributed music to 12 feature film scores.

David Prior is a musician and artist. With Architect Frances Crow, he is a partner in liminal, a practice that explores the relationship between sound, listening, and space (liminal.org.uk). Prior is Professor of Music and Sound Art and Director of Research at Falmouth University.

List of Contributors

Introduction
Jane Grant, John Matthias and David Prior

Space

1. Keynote: Witnessing Space
Andrea Polli

2. Danfo
Emeka Ogboh

3. Felt Spaces
Gernot B?hme

4. Sound in Mediated Space
DooEun Choi

5. Inhabiting the Uninhabitable: atmospheres and boundaries as other worlds
Jane Grant

Time

6. Keynote: Sound and Time
Christoph Cox

7. Now in the Network
Michael Rofe

8. The Inter-human Cortex
John Matthias

9. Space-Time and Integrated Systems
Ian Clothier

10. Sound and Wonder: Siren, Ethnometric Museum and the sound art theatre of Ray Lee
Ray Lee

11. The Art that is made out of Time
Stephen Kennedy

Things

12. Keynote: Sound and Thing
Aden Evens

13. Sacrificial Floors and Tables: Making/ Unmaking Sound
John Richards

14. The Unreliable Mediator: Loudspeakers in Sound Art
David Prior

15. A New Materiality: Post Speaker Sound Art
Fari Bradley

16. The Ding in Itself
John Mowitt

17. Sound Art as Locative Narrative
Emma Whittaker

Fabric

18. Keynote: Sound is Silence
Greg Hainge

19. Woven, torn and stitched: The fabrication of Sound
Dugal McKinnon

20. 'And I listened to the whistlings and patterlings outside': Hearing the Wild Spaces as sound
Angus Carlyle

21. Against a falling Fabric: Neoliberal Acousmatics
Seth Kim-Cohen

22. Sound's Embrace: The Art of Building with Sound
Frances Crow

23. Fukushima: Silences That Count
Sophie Houdart

Senses

24. Keynote: Sonic Sense: The Meaning of the Invisible
Salom? Voegelin

25. Last Breath, Sensing Life
Zeynep Bulut

26. Soundfullness (pitch black)
Christof Migone

27. Chthonic: 72 hours below Earth day: the sensed, the remembered, the lost and the reconstructed
Louise K. Wilson

28. An Experience of Listening
Sue Denham and Istv?n Winkler

29. Intimate Listening
Mark Paterson

Relationality

30. Keynote: Relationality and Matrixal Listening
Brandon Labelle

31. Composing Fragmented Relations with Materials, Locations and Archives
Jen Southern and Samuel Thulin

32. Sound Art: Hearing in particular
John Drever

33. The Sonic Undercommons: Sound Art in Radical Black Arts Traditions
Gascia Ouzonian

34. The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear: Amplifying the Whiteness of Sound Art's
Historiography
Jennifer Lyn Stoever

35. A Social Sonic Paradigm: Sound Art in Southern Africa
Tegan Bristow and Joao Orrechia

36. State Listening
UltraRed

Index