The Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer’s most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer expands his earlier research in musique concrète to suggest a methodology of working with sounds based on his experiences in radio broadcasting and the recording studio. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also on philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, Schaeffer’s essay summarizes his theoretical and practical work in music composition. Translators Christine North and John Dack present an important book in the history of ideas in Europe that will resonate far beyond electroacoustic music.

"The Treatise on musical objects by Pierre Schaeffer is regarded as his most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer refers to his earlier research in musique concráete and expands this to suggest a methodology of working with sounds resulting from the recording process. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, Schaeffer's book summarizes his theoretical and practical work in music composition. North and Dack present an important book in the history of ideas in Europe that will resonate far beyond electroacoustic music."--Provided by publisher.

Suitable for those interested in contemporary musicology or media history, this title offers a translation of the author's pioneering work - at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d'etre of concrete music.

Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in the forefront of contemporary sonic discussions but also underscore auditory experience as fundamental to sound as a critical enterprise. In so doing, they offer exciting considerations of sound within and beyond its role in meaning, communication, and information and an illuminatingly original theoretical overview of the field of sound studies itself. Contributors. Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, John Dack, Veit Erlmann, Brian Kane, Jairo Moreno, John Mowitt, Pooja Rangan, Gavin Steingo, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne, David Toop

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseen pursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice. The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses.