Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity [Hardcover]

Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual—at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural.Sonic Time Machinesaims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorizing sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, “sonicity,” a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.

Wolfgang Ernstis professor of media theory at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.