Sound Art Geographies: Listening at the Limits of Audibility

Abstract

This paper explores the generative yet underexamined relation between human geography and sound art. Sound art has long been concerned with issues of spatiality, place and environment and yet interest in sound art from human geographers has been somewhat sparse, particularly when compared to the wealth of literature on visual art in the discipline. In this context, the paper does three things. First, it reviews debates in sound art theory to highlight how sound art is often discussed as performing critical interventions in perceptions of space. Second, it examines how such interventions have been engaged by human geographers in the limited body of literature currently existing on sound art in the discipline, which suggests that sound art can reveal some of the unheard histories, experiences and voices of spaces. Finally, it suggests that geographic engagements with sound art might productively explore the contention, legible in recent work in sound studies and philosophy, that sound art can create spaces of affect in which an audience is exposed to the limits of prevailing schemas of audibility. Rather than producing a better or more accurate representation of space, the paper argues that sound art instead can provoke affective encounters with alternative temporalities, silences and non-human life.