Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards A Philosophy Of Sound Art

“The examples under discussion range from by-now canonical soundworks…to recent works by a clutch of lesser known artists…Voegelin’s critical style is so singular that she avoids cliche in the treatment of all these artists, prising them out of a conversation about music and into a challenging treatise on the art of listening.” ―The Wire

“The book’s arguments are complex and developed with rigour, making a perceptive contribution to an emerging debate. In its favour, the work consistently forces the listener off-track to think critically about just what it is that makes listening so powerful and so elusive.” ―Will Montgomery, The Wire, August 2010

“Reviewed in the London Review of Books 23 September (UK)” ―London Review of Books

“Listening to Noise and Silence will be of interest to a great many people following breakthrough trends within art and philosophy.” ―Art Monthly

“Salome Voegelin has written an excellent book about sound art, escaping cliché and easy categorizations. She establishes a proper aesthetics and philosophy of sound, with a compelling phenomenological account of noise and silence.” ―Neural

“In Voegelin’s evocative image, noise holds the listener hostage to his or her own listening… Listening to Noise and Silence contains many moments that sound artists and others will find insightful.” ―Avant Music News

“There cannot be a concluding remark to encompass Listening to Noise and Silence. You might not even completely ‘understand’ it if you refuse to ‘feel’ it and ‘know’ it or if you aim at making ends meet evenly. It will question you, it will confuse you, it will exhilarate you. It will prompt you to reinvent it over and over: in listening, in writing.” ―Journal of Sonic Studies

Salomé Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, UK and an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014) and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018), all by Bloomsbury Academic. Her work and writing deal with sound and the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.