ABSTRACT Sound art activity in Colombia has proliferated in the last decade, as evidenced by the considerable number of shows focusing on sound works by Colombian artists in recent years. The author presents three artists—Rodrigo Restrepo, Leonel Vásquez and Ícaro Zorbar—each of whom represents a distinct point in the continuum between music and sound art. The artists' individual and distinct approaches to the use of technology and their very personal conceptions of space and time are discussed.

ABSTRACT This article introduces examples of recent sound art in Belfast, a city that has undergone radical transformation over the past decade and is home to a burgeoning community of sound artists. The text investigates the ways in which sonic art can redraw boundaries in a city historically marked by myriad political, socioeconomic, religious and sectarian divisions. The article focuses on sound works that reimagine a “post-conflict” Belfast. These include site-specific sound installations in urban and public spaces, soundwalks, sculptures, locative and online works, and experimental sonic performances that draw upon traditional Irish song and music.

ABSTRACT In the mid-20th century a new conceptual paradigm rose to prominence in the sciences that captured the imaginations of the burgeoning counterculture and its most forward-thinking artists. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, a branch of systems theory called cybernetics was presented as a way to understand complex systems. Cybernetic thought has continued to exert a hegemonic, if unintended, influence in the field of experimental and technology-driven arts. The author argues that the idealistic and techno-utopian character of cybernetic thought, including the holistic view of emergence, does not serve us in grave political and ecological times and suggests new ways to understand emergence in sound art that are free of the ideological baggage of cybernetic thought.

ABSTRACT The article addresses two pieces of sound art that incorporate field recordings from the site of the Berlin Wall, during the deconstruction of its concrete presence in East Germany. The author examines two pieces as a case study for the consideration of the historical potential of soundscapes and proposes that the developing genre possesses the capability to preserve the sound of history, in ways that are not possible with written sources. The potential problems associated with the works' reevaluation as historical sources and further works that would benefit from similar reconsideration are discussed.

ABSTRACT This paper provides an overview of electrical pre-loudspeaker sound art in Victorian music halls, focusing on key figures, including one of the first female performers of an electrical musical instrument. Control of “acoustic incidents” separate from the artiste and the employment of artful presentation to create an aesthetic edifice—prerequisites of sound art—are apparent in the entertainments examined here. It is shown that the issues of today's sound art (in reconciling science with art, the coveting of the “active principle,” etc.) were also a concern in these early sound art ventures.

ABSTRACT The notion of discreet sound arises through the encounter of the sonic avant-garde with the post-studio methods of the field of sculpture: a distinctive, situational aesthetics that aspires to relocate, and sometimes to disperse, the listening experience within the varied spaces of everyday life. In sound art, however, there seems a predominant interest in the sounding object as an experience delivered to the audience through indoor modalities. By comparing these two tendencies, this article observes some of the implications for the ways in which we think about the site and modes specific to listening practices.

ABSTRACT This paper defines the object-based sound installation as a distinct category of sound art that emerges from the intersection of live musical performance and the sonic possibilities of the recording studio. In order to contextualize this emergent category, connections are drawn among the rationalization of the senses, automated musical instruments, the lineage of recorded sound and the notion of absolute music. This interwoven history provides the necessary backdrop for the interpretation of three major works by Steven Reich, Alvin Lucier and Zimoun. These respective pieces are described in order to elucidate the ways in which object-based sound installations introduce embodied visibility into the transformative gestures of sound reproduction.

ABSTRACT Silencing and musicalization, as defined by Douglas Kahn, are valuable means to call attention to the sonically liminal. They create a frame within which acoustic silence can be attended to, either as a conceptual phenomenon or as the dead silence of sounds and soundmakers subjected to ecological silencing. Through critical discussion of silence in Kahn's writing on John Cage, as well as in acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, an outline of ecological silencing is developed and applied through the examination of environmentally engaged sound works by Sally Ann McIntyre of New Zealand and Katie Paterson of Great Britain.