Sound Art and Music: Philosophy, Composition, Performance
This volume explores the mutually beneficial, but occasionally uneasy, relationship between sound art and music. It reveals how practices and theories associated with these art forms frequently result in corroboration, and contains chapters from both practitioners and theoreticians who work in areas where innovative synergies between sound art and music can be identified. Although practice and theory are inseparable, discourses surrounding practice are elusive but informative, and, as such, are given particular recognition and exploration in this volume. Taken as a whole, the book provides a snapshot of contemporary research across a range of sound art and music disciplines, showcasing the variety, scope and scale of this exciting, if bewildering, area of study.
Dr John Dack is a musicologist who lectures in Music, Technology and Fine Art at Middlesex University. He studied at City University and Goldsmiths, UK, has lectured and published internationally, and co-translated and co-published key texts from French including Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music and Treatise on Musical Objects. His current research areas include the history, theory and analysis of electroacoustic music, the music and works of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and serial thought.
Dr Tansy Spinks is an artist, performer, musician and lecturer who has exhibited and taught nationally and internationally. She runs the MA in Fine Art at Middlesex University, UK. Her current research interests engage with sound in live, site-specific art performance, modes of listening, concepts of audiation, instructional text scores, improvisatory performance, sound and materiality and sound and narrative.
Dr Adam Stanović is an electronic music composer whose works have been heard in over 400 international concerts around the world, published on 12 different CDs and featured in the finals of many composition competitions. His writings, previously published under the name Stansbie, address various topics relating to electronic music, including compositional methods and reflections on the many philosophical dilemmas that electronic music seems to produce. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK.
“These reflections on sound and music constitute a most welcome addition to the Sonic Arts literature. The variety of sound practices represented, as the sonic experiments of both visual artists and composers—including co-editors Tansy Spinks and Adam Stanovic respectively—are explored alongside those of performers, choreographers and a wide range of other practitioners, from bio-acousticians to ASMR YouTubers. The intersection of these perspectives leads to a surprising array of observations on creative processes, inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, often mediated by digital technologies.
Patricia Alessandrini
Assistant Professor, Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University, USA
“In the last seventy or more years, new arts of sound have emerged, some clearly within more traditional notions of music, others seeming at first quite separate. Recently, this has increasingly been challenged. Conceptions of performance, instrument, embodiment, tool, process, product, space, site and media are all in creative flux. Sound Art and Music: Philosophy, Composition, Performance brings many of these ideas together in a wide-ranging and critical discussion, starting out from reflective practice. This is a vital new contribution to the literature.”
Simon Emmerson
Composer; Professor in Music, Technology and Innovation, De Montfort University, UK
Buy This Book
