The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art

Description

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and aesthetic analysis. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

Sanne Krogh Groth is Associate Professor of Musicology at Lund University, Sweden. She is Office Director of the Sound Environment Centre, Lund University, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Seismograf. She is author of the book Politics and Aesthetics in Electronic Music (2014) and is currently conducting field-based research on experimental music and de-colonial aesthetics in Indonesia. Holger Schulze is Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of numerous books including Sound as Popular Culture (2016), The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Sound Works (Bloomsbury, 2019).

[This book] deserves a wide and engaged readership, for this is an important collection of curated essays that drives the debates around sound art into new territories. Its focus on sound as an operative force that might hold power to account makes it that rare thing, a most timely textbook. * The Wire * Sanne Krogh Groth and Holger Schulze have edited a volume of almost 600 pages that consists of very interesting texts that explain how social perspectives and art historical theory can fruitfully be applied to sound art and yield insights not easily developed through the traditional focus on sound and space. The book makes a very good case for why it is necessary to expand the reading and understanding of sound art's many sub-genres in order to grasp the contemporary developments, in particular socially engaged works with political intentionality. * Joran Rudi in Organised Sound, December 2020 * An innovative, comprehensive and timely volume that I cannot recommend enough. * SoundEffects * A welcome and important book that greatly enriches the scope of the sound art domain and should be of considerable interest to both theorists and practitioners. * Journal of Sonic Studies *