Sound art. Sound as a medium of art

Three events have changed the course and character of music radically : the invention of notation, the discovery of noise, and the creation of electronic instruments (from synthesizers to computers). The revolutionary consequence was sound art, a new kind of music, a new acoustic art. Since the beginning of the new millennium, several histories of sound art have been written and have succeeded in establishing sound art as an artistic genre in its own right.
Today a new universe of sound confronts us. Each and every object can create sound and can be connected via sensors to a computer where all kinds of sound samples or compositional techniques are stored to generate new sonic zones. In addition, not only can every object produce sound, every space can as well. Sounds are everywhere and every-where the ambience is sonic. Finally, over the course of the twentieth century, sound art has become a universal medium.
Consequently, this publication endeavors to move beyond the established disciplinary divides to open our eyes and ears to the full potential of sound as a medium of art in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. This book may be the first comprehensive compendium that spans the history and the presence of sound art on a global scale.