Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice

Recommended." --Choice"Sound Unseen is both successful and provocative precisely because of these constructive dissonances. Furthermore, Kane shows how music studies and philosophy can speak to each other when they are conceived as mutually supplemental--questions about sound infect philosophical questions, and thus a musical answer becomes a philosophical answer. It is a rare book that can put thinkers as diverse as P. Finally, Kane's tone deserves special mention, as it untangles knotty philosophical questions with remarkably accessible language: despite the densi

His research specializes in contemporary music, sound art, sound studies/auditory culture, histories of listening, and intersections between music and philosophy.. Brian Kane is Assistant Professor of Music at Yale University and a founding editor of the journal nonsite

Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseenpursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to iek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. According to l