Sounding Things Out: A Journey Through Music and Sound Art

An idiosyncratic and affordable cross-genre history of sound art, from Alexander von Humboldt to Eliane Radigue

In Sounding Things Out, Dutch composer and sound artist Esther Venrooy (born 1974) seeks to enlarge and diversify the narrative on sound art by highlighting important pioneers in the field and drawing from her own experiences working in music, sound and installation.

Venrooy discusses a number of modern and contemporary figures whose work has contributed significantly to the genre, such as the godfather of movie sound, Walter Murch; sound artist and founding member of Cabaret Voltaire Chris Watson; naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt; pioneer wildlife recordist Ludwig Karl Koch; and the composers James Fulkerson, Eliane Radigue, Edgard Varese, Luc Ferrari, Maryanne Amacher, MSBR (aka Koji Tano) and others.

Throughout the book, Venrooy attends to the lived, cognitive experience of sound and its implication in memory and emotional life, interweaving these with a richly informed take on the medium’s history.