Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere
beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When
separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent
realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend,
the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a
veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music,
listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds,
employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources.
With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of
sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the
phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word,
"acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the
mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete Pierre
Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without
seeing its cause. 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. 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. Finely
detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseenpursues unseen
sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to
Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, 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.
The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of
"acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of
philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the
history of the senses."
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