Recently published in The Journal of Sonic Studies: my review of Usue Ruiz Arana’s very inspiring book Urban Soundscapes. A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design.
Archives for category: Books
Just published and open access: a rich overview of the current discourse on sound, health, and well-being. My own contribution deals with the role sound art can play in creating a more liveable environment. An important opportunity for improvement can be found in sound’s supportive role in establishing more attentive interactions between human (and non-human) beings and their (sonic) environment. Here’s a link to the book.
Today, I found this book on my doormat: New Paradigms for Music Research: Art, Society and Technology, edited by Adolf Murillo, Ines Monreal, Jesus Tejada and David Carabias and issued by the University of Valencia (Spain). Contributors are participants to the first International Conference on the Intersection of Art, Society and Technology in Musical Innovation in 2021, organized by the same university.
My contribution consists of a text on soundwalking, mostly concentrating on my development of a soundwalk in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2021. My claim is that this art form takes in fact place between art and non-art and as such has both artistic and societal significance.
Last week I’ve recorded a podcast together with Francesco Aletta, Tin Oberman and Andrew Mitchell in London based on my latest book Engaging With Everyday Sounds. Will be broadcast soon.
I’m happy to announce that my new (e-)book “Engaging with Everyday Sounds” is now freely available. Please go to https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0288 to download the book in various formats.
‘Engaging With Everyday Sounds’ explores the role of sounds in everyday life, including their impact on human actions, emotions, and imagination. I intertwine sonic studies with philosophy, sound art, sociology and more to create an innovative guide to sonic materialism, calling for a re-sensitization to our acoustic environment and arguing that everyday sounds have (micro)political, social, and ethical impact to which we should attend.
Exploring the intellectual history of sound studies as well as local, global, and temporal sonic geographies, I weave audio files, images, and journal excerpts into this work to create a multimodal monograph that explores the relationships of humans, nonhumans, and their environments through sound. The book contains an interdisciplinary collection of short essays, which might be valuable reading for both academics and the general reader interested in sound studies, sound art, philosophy, or the sociology of everyday life—and for anyone keen to think about the sonic in new and engaging ways.
Today two new books arrived, both containing an essay of mine. The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy includes my reflections on (everyday) listening; my contribution to Ethics and Christian Musicking is called “The Silence of the Monks” and takes as its point of departure the friary of the Carthusian order in a French monastery. The monks are not allowed to speak but of course always surrounded by (and themselves producing) sound.
Good news! The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, edited by Barry Truax, Vincent Meelberg and myself is now also available in a paperback version.
Recently published: Musik, die Wissen schafft. Perspektiven kunstlerischer Musikforschung, edited by Arnold Jacobshagen. The book contains many interesting essays, from Darla Crispin, John Rink, Deniz Peters, and Barthold Kuijken, among others. Also a text by me, entitled “Kunstlerische Forschung und Klangkunst im offentlichen Stadtraum” about sound artworks in public urban spaces by Max Neuhaus, Peter Cusack, Edwin van der Heide, and Asa Stjerna in relation to micropolitics and sonic materialism.
Just to let you know that my online PhD dissertation from 2002 – Deconstruction in Music – is completely renewed. See here!
This book fell this morning on my door mat. It contains great essays by Michael Schwab, Jonathan Impett, Juan Parra, Mieko Kanno and many others … and one by me too: “Artistic Research and Sound Art in Public Urban Spaces.”
From the article: “It is the aim of this chapter to expand and examine in more detail how artistic research and sound art relate to one another. To do so, I will concentrate on several existing sound art works, all situated in public urban spaces. The main reason for this demarcation is that working on and with public urban spaces often requires more “research” from the sound artist than producing a so-called autonomous, non-site-specific art work. I will try to answer questions such as: How do sound artists contribute towards developments in the arts as well as knowledge production? Which spaces of research and which methodological tools do they use? Which new concepts have they developed? It is my hope that this chapter will show that artistic research and sound studies—both still marginal (and marginalised) in current academic fields—contribute in significant and unique ways towards rethinking our being-in-and-with-the-world.”
In what follows I pay attention to Max Neuhaus, Peter Cusack, Edwin van der Heide, and Asa Stjerna, and connect their work to micropolitics and sonic materialism.
Thinking Sounds 