Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts

(Paperback)

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This interdisciplinary history of the theory of sound in the arts reads the 20th century by listening to it - to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, threatre and film. Placing aurality at the centre of the history of arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include: Atnonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eistenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo and Dziga Vertov.

Reviews

"Kahn's research is impressive, and his presentation is thorough and precise." - Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal; "...a unique and important contribution to this emerging, exciting field. It is overflowing with ideas, references, and conjecture." - John Levack Drever, The Art Book

Author Bio

Douglas Kahn is Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Noise Water Meat- A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press) and Earth Sound Earth Signal- Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts and coeditor of Wireless Imagination- Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press).