SONIC FLUX: SOUND, ART, AND METAPHYSICS (trailer)

Christoph Cox, SONIC FLUX: SOUND, ART, AND METAPHYSICS (University of Chicago Press, 2018) From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary sound installation, field recording, and experimental film, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precede and exceed those expressions. Cox shows how, over the past several centuries, philosophers and artists have explored this “sonic flux” and, in the process, contributed to a rethinking of ontology, temporality, and the relationships between sound and image. Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Éliane Radigue, and others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materiali