Sound Stream. Sound, Art and Metaphysics

In recent decades, we have been witnessing a shift in contemporary culture “from music to sound”, since the term “music” no longer corresponds to the rapid development of new artistic genres and cultural attitudes. As a result of this shift, on the one hand, there has been a rapid development of sound art, and on the other, a flourishing of Sound Studies in the humanities. The goal of Christoph Cox’s book is to explain the “sound turn” in art and culture, and to show how sound invades the territory of philosophy and renews it. In solving this problem, the author challenges the main concepts of contemporary cultural theory based on the analysis of discourse and language, and declares the need for a new materialistic aesthetics not only of sound, but of art in general. The central concept of the book is the sonic flow – an anonymous materialistic force that precedes man and surpasses his subjective experience. In an attempt to construct a realistic and naturalistic model for describing sound, Cox draws on the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel Delanda, illustrating them with the works of La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Christian Marclay, Marianne Amacher, Annie Lockwood and many others. The result is not only one of the most fundamental and profound studies of the ontology of sound, but also a fascinating history of the little-studied sound art of the last fifty years.