Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity - Utopia of Sound

Authors: Nora M. Alter, Michel Chion, Christoph Cox, Diedrich Diederichsen, Caryl Flinn, Barbara Flückiger, Tom Holert, Brandon LaBelle, Christian Petzold, Constanze Ruhm, Christian Scheib, Holger Schulze, Axel Stockburger, Terre Thaemlitz, Hildegard Westerkamp

In the last two decades there has been a significant boom in the cultural sensibility towards sounds and noise - a kind of sonic boom that can, following the second meaning of this term, be seen as a breakthrough of the sonic itself. In the wake of this phenomenon, the relationship between Fine Arts and sound as a material of production on the one hand, and the field of Sound Art which emerged since the 60s on the other hand was recalibrated. Questions surrounding issues of spatiality in the Fine Arts that gained in importance with the surge of intermedia installations were increasingly posed on the basis of experimental sound. Pop music has recognised its specific relation to the materiality of sound as its primary source and positioned it at the core of self-reflective projects. Through the ubiquity of individual and ever-present sonic markers such as mobile phone jingles and sound installations in public space, everyday life has become the scene of a continuous sonic semiosis.