DES ARTS SONNANTS - CRÉATION SONORE ET ENVIRONNEMENT - ENVIRONMENTAL SOUND ART

A Philosophonics of Space: 
Sound, Futurity and the End of the World Frances Dyson

* In Silence John Cage refers to sound as a "transmission in all directions from the field's center."[1]
* Stockhausen cites St. Thomas, who speaks of "The exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal bursting forth in sound."[2]
* Edgard Varese remarks that he likes "music that explodes."[3]
* For critic Herbert Ruscoll, it is no surprise that the era of electronic music should coincide with the atomic age.[4]There is a common trope beaming through these representations of aurality, and that is the trope of radiance. Radiance is a wonderfully synthetic metaphor - providing a bridge between sound as an individual, organic phenomenon present in the minutae of the world and sound spread out across the vast expanse of imaginable and fictive space. This union between the micro and macrocosm, also combines differing and at times opposing ontologies. Radiance offers the security of the object, long held as the foundation of being and knowledge.[5] At the same time, it suggests the fluidity and ephemerality of the event. By providing a compromise between the object and the event, radiance connotes a sense of organic process, of movement, change and complexity - the presumed essence of vitality itself - whilst maintaining a sense of identity and individuality. In an age where rigid structures are being replaced by malleable forms, where the borders of the object are beginning to bleed, sound, with its eventfullness, familiarity and security, becomes a very appropriate medium for the renogiations of time and space integral to such massive transformations.[6]