The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art resists easy analysis. For one, the vast scope requires a reading commitment like few other volumes. Within these covers are 36 chapters arranged under six conceptual headings: Space, Time, Things, Fabric, Senses, and Relationality. This review will begin with a consideration of sound art itself, before tracing one possible reading path through this material.

Many practitioners quite understandably resist categorising their work under the rubric sound art, or indeed any other. But Annea Lockwood is an example of an artist who finds the term useful for describing pieces ‘presented in galleries, museums, other places in which sound is, increasingly, conceived of as a medium per se, like video, lasers, but not as performance’ (Licht Reference Licht2007: 10). This definition was expanded by Alan Licht to include a) installation works defined by (acoustic) space rather than time, b) primarily visual works with a sonic element (e.g., sound sculptures) and c) sound works by visual artists that largely conform to their established aesthetic (ibid.: 16–17). The details might be debated, but what is important is that this term need not have one fixed definition, instead admitting a spectrum of thought and practice. Nonetheless, the editors of the present volume evade the matter of definition, wishing instead to allow ‘constellations of disparate thought’ (p. xi). Yet their handbook is about sound art and not sonic art, sounding arts, or some other formulation. Without some examination of the historical basis of the term, important context for contemporary practice is lacking.

Though the term ‘sound art’ had been used as shorthand for experimental or new music, it only came into its own, as a distinct set of practices, with Dan Lander’s introduction to the seminal collection Sound by Artists (Lander and Lexier Reference Lander and Lexier1990). Alan Licht makes this claim in his book (Licht Reference Licht2007: 11), while Douglas Khan acknowledges the seeds of Noise, Water, Meat in Lander’s idea, even though Khan chose to avoid using the label for his own volume (Kahn Reference Kahn2006: 7). Lander wished to refute the claim that sound art was ‘synonymous and interchangeable’ with experimental music (Lander and Lexier Reference Lander and Lexier1990: 10). He quotes musician and music critic Chris Cutler objecting similarly to the eliding of ‘sound’ and ‘music’ into one undifferentiated mass (ibid.: 11). Despite the form- and genre-breaking activities of Russolo, Varèse, Cage, Schaeffer and so on the erasure of all difference between terms benefits neither, since it removes useful constraints and those tentative boundaries that provide terrain for debate. We can recognise that definitions are provisional without abandoning them entirely, lest all difference be homogenised. It’s disappointing, then, that the importance of Sound by Artists is not explored anywhere in this Handbook. Its absence produces a strange historical lacuna at the centre of the very topic under consideration. Nonetheless, Lander’s call for active investigation of sound is indeed answered throughout these chapters, in a multitude of ways. The remainder of this review will trace one specific thread through the collection; every reader will adopt their own reading approach.

My practice has forced me to consider how soundscape studies might articulate tensions between experimental music and sound art. R. Murray Schafer based his pivotal 1977 book on the premise that noise pollution was an apocalyptic event, threatening ‘universal deafness’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 3). He proposed clairaudience as a positive response to this threat, an alternative to the negative response of noise abatement (ibid.: 4). The gathering and interpreting of evidence as an interdisciplinary study of ‘acoustic design’ would, in Schafer’s optimistic view, allow control over the ‘world soundscape’ (ibid.: 4–5). The resulting World Soundscape Project was reliant on an ideology that ‘treat[ed] the world as a macrocosmic musical composition’, an explicit extension of Cage’s declaration that all sounds can be musical (ibid.: 5). Hence soundscape composition, from its very origins, largely conforms to the reductive sound-art-as-experimental-music definition that Lander warned was insufficient.

Seventeen of the chapters in this Handbook use the term ‘soundscape’, which demonstrates the degree to which the term has entered common parlance. For example, Emeka Ogboh describes a series of intriguing works that displace the intense sounds of urban Lagos to museum sites as Lagos Soundscapes (p. 16). But since the phrase ‘sound art’ is absent from Ogboh’s contribution, the inclusion of this chapter raises interesting questions. Are soundscape works considered by the editors to be sound art by definition? Or is there something special in these particular works that invites inclusion?

Andrea Polli’s associative chapter on vibration, mood and environment opens the section on Space. Polli quotes Hildegard Westerkamp and Andra McCartney to support the claim that simply ‘walking through the landscape can be a political act’, one that connects an embodied listener to the world through sound (p. 5). Installation works by Mark Bain and Maryanne Amacher communicate sounds that otherwise would not be audible. In such cases the intention of the artist in foregrounding particular sources, or particular ways of listening, ‘may have the potential to increase environmental understanding’ (p. 12). This chapter provides a link between installation works widely studied as sound art (indeed, Amacher is discussed in two other chapters) and a soundscape practice that conforms to Schafer’s belief in the power of education.

Emma Whittaker considers ‘Sound Art as Locative Narrative’ in the context of Baudelaire’s flâneur, who transforms urban space into a theatrical setting, and Guy Debord’s psychogeographic approach to urban environments (p. 233). Locative narrative is defined as a sound art that leverages site-specificity and mobile technologies to create imaginative sonic spaces (p. 231). Works such as Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice (1999) use a ‘story world’ to destabilise the experiential world (and vice versa), changing the ‘participant’s relations to perceptual and imaginary objects’ (p. 237). Readers involved with sound mapping and related practices might be particularly interested in this discussion of phenomenological ambiguity and fictive world-building. While this approach might be antithetical to some field recording practices (e.g., ‘nature recording’), Whittaker encourages practitioners to destabilise the indexical relationship of sounds to their environment.

Gernot Böhme directly addresses the problem of differentiating sound art from music by considering ‘felt space’. Schafer’s ‘soundscape composition’ is an example ‘of a musical specialism of sound art,’ in which a felt space might well be ‘a side effect’ (p. 32). But when ‘artists explicitly pattern spaces and places within installations’ the perception of a felt space becomes the primary goal. This is evidenced in sound art that directly explores built environments in terms of acoustic perception. The vocabulary introduced in this chapter proves useful in articulating the core tensions between these fields of study.

Less interested in sound art, Ultra-red (a collective) nonetheless provide a cogent interpretation of the soundscape doctrine, leveraging their political activism and long-standing interest in the sound body (Ultra-red 1994). They conclude that the World Soundscape Project created ‘a new social consensus’, that conformed to ‘state listening’, rather than providing a radical or revolutionary transformation to existing structures (p. 565). This measured chapter is quite unlike their poetic and rambunctious earlier writings, but it is welcome here as a new critical approach to Schafer’s foundational work.

The matter of definition is addressed directly by several writers. John Mowitt uses John Cage’s incongruous appearance on a television game show as a jumping off point for a nuanced exploration of radiophonic works, by way of Heidegger, Kant and Derrida. Michael Rofe distinguishes between music and sound art practices using Christoph Cox’s prior work. Music concerns itself with sound objects arranged in time, following a pulse overlaid on a temporal grid, whereas sound art is concerned with duration, the time in which sound itself exists. Cox’s own keynote chapter describes the works of such well-known artists as John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, La Monte Young, Christina Kubisch and Christian Marclay.

Two chapters directly challenge Cox’s conventional canon. Gascia Ouzounian’s contribution is rich with examples of Black sound artists who have engaged with ‘conceptualism, multidimensionality, relationality, and radical politics’ (p. 514). Jennifer Stoever’s detailed investigation into Camille Norment’s Trip Light challenges both sound art and popular music as adhering to ‘white supremacist ideology’ (p. 522). Ouzounian and Stoever’s chapters are among the most vital in the book, forcing us to rethink stale assumptions. Should a second handbook be produced some time hence, readers might profit from extending the examples presented by these authors, in order to further challenge established norms.

Perhaps no one book, no matter how vast, can suffice to function as a free-standing compendium on a topic this broad. Despite its scope, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art does not quite manage this task. Rather, it should be read alongside prior works, including those already referenced in this review (Lander and Lexier Reference Lander and Lexier1990; Kahn Reference Kahn2001; Licht Reference Licht2007; Kelly Reference Kelly2017). Thirty-six chapters might take a year to thoroughly read, but your commitment will be rewarded with challenging ideas, illuminating analyses, new approaches and a panoply of enticing artistic experiments to seek out and explore. This book is essential for anyone involved in aesthetic sound practice or theory, including, it can be supposed, every reader here.