Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

by Salomé Voegelin

Listening to Noise and Silence engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salomé Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility.


A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow.


Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. Listening to Noise and Silence broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Research

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Alex Braidwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

The sections describing and critiquing the existing works were engaging and informative. The other writings where the author attempts to set up and encapsulate the sections are far reaching, lacked focus and repetitive.

Also, this book is yet another unfortunate victim of whatever happened to cause Continuum Publishing to stop using proofreaders.

[Lee Wen · Rating 4 out of 5]

silence is just as good a sound
noise is music rejected by snobs

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent phenomenological account of noise and silence

[Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

inspiring and beautifully thought through. not unproblematic in places, but very very recommended.

[Andrew Herting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provocative and helpful, but flawed. Worth a quick read. Has good insights and quotable gems, but also flat-out errors, both in grammar and logic.

[Ela Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting phenomenological approach to sonic perceptual experience, though some lines of thought fail to resonate (pun intended)

[Matthew Butler · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging aesthetic theory of Sound Art rooted in a phenomenology of perception. The author goes to great lengths to describe Listening to sensorial material and supplements her investigations with a good curation of sound experiments. There is an inherent tension between subjectivity and objectivity in the emergent properties of listening and traditional artistic boundaries fail to demarcate this. The book chapters themselves seem more like clusters of topics that loosely model this art form. Listening, Noise, Silence, Time, Space, Now describe the listener as much as the sound.