Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics

Description

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. The Sonic Flux and Sonic Materialism 1. Toward a Sonic Materialism Signification, Discourse, and Materialism Representation and the Sonic Arts Schopenhauer: Below Representation Nietzsche: The Naturalization of Art Dionysus, or the Intensive Sound as an Immemorial Flux Sonic Events and Sound Effects A Materialist Aesthetics 2. A Brief History of the Sonic Flux Noise, Deterritorialization, and Self-Organization Systems of Sonic Capture Interlude—Christian Marclay: Repetition and Difference Digitality, Decommodification, and Deterritorialization 3. The Symbolic and the Real: Phonography from Music to Sound Hearing Things Alvin Lucier: From Signification to Noise Part II. Being and Time in the Sonic Arts 4. Signal to Noise: An Ontology of Sound Art Noise Leibniz and the Auditory Unconscious Sound Art and the Sonic Flux Room Tone Sound, Symbol, Sample Music and Sound Art 5. Sound, Time, and Duration Beyond the Musical Object: From Being to Becoming, Time to Duration Installing Duration: Postminimalism in the Visual Arts Time's Square Time Pieces Against Becoming and Duration? The Sound of Hyper-Chaos Part III. The Optical and the Sonic 6. Audio/Visual: Against Synaesthetics From Gesamtkunstwerk to Synaesthesia Sound/Image Synaesthetics 2.0 Sound Figures Dubs and Versions Sound Cinema: Film and Video as Sonic Art A Transcendental Exercise of the Faculties Notes Index