Hearing the Continuum of Sound
SALOMÉ VOEGELIN
1The landscape as sonic possible world
2Into the world of the work: The possibility of sound art
3Sonic materialism: The sound of stones
4Hearing the continuum of sound
5Listening to the inaudible: The sound of unicorns
This journey through Sonic Possible Worlds would not have been achievable without the support of family, friends, and colleagues. I am grateful for the many stimulating conversations and debates with peers, students, and friends, and am thankful for all the guidance, feedback, and criticism that have advanced my ideas and enabled this endeavor.
I want to especially thank David Mollin for his love and support and our ongoing collaboration, which challenges my habits of listening and sound making. I am immensely grateful also to Angus Carlyle and Daniela Cascella for their close reading of the manuscript and their invaluable advice for its revision. I want to thank Cathy Lane for always being inspiring and encouraging, and David Toop for many conversations and much listening. I am grateful for the continuing exchange on sound art and music with Thomas Gardner, and appreciative of the research environment at CRiSAP (Centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) and of my colleagues at LCC (the London College of Communication), Chris Petter, John Wynne, Nye Parry, Ximena Alarcón, Ed Baxter, and Peter Cusack, whose work and ideas nourish and challenge my own. I want to thank Lou Mallozzi for giving me the opportunity to publicly test my first sketches of a sonic possibilia, Marcel Cobussen for enabling the publication of a sonic fiction, and Brandon LaBelle for inviting me to present some later thoughts. I am very thankful for all the opportunities I had to try my ideas in public and am very conscious of the importance that the work of the sound arts students at LCC had on the development of my writing, and hope that in return the ideas put forward here will help them to further their own research and practice.
I am grateful for the vicinity of Anne Hilde-Neset in the early stages of my research, and for the encouragement of Allen S. Weiss and the debates with Christoph Cox. I am especially thankful also to Chris Watson, Claudia Molitor, Francisco López, Clare Gasson, Mark Peter Wright, Mikhail Karikis, and Signe Lidén for their time and patience clarifying and discussing their pieces with me, and want to mention all the artists whose works are discussed in the book for inspiring my listening and writing through their sounds. Finally, I also would like to thank David Barker and Ally Jane Grossan of Continuum, Bloomsbury, for trusting me to write this book, and for giving me the opportunity to put these ideas into the public realm.