Augaitis, Daina., and Dan Lander. Radio Rethink : Art, Sound and Transmission. Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994.

Until recently, radio has been a relatively unexplored aspect of artistic practices; this book asks why. From philosophical, historical and cultural analyses to poetic writings by artists, this unique reference explores radio culture and the unusual activity possible when contemporary artists use radio as their medium. Radio will never sound the same again.

Bianci, Frederick and Manzo V.J Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words (England: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. Environmental sound art is generally applied to sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional, contemporary music through the conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving.

Chion, Michel. Film, a Sound Art. [English ed.]., Columbia University Press, 2009.

French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise—it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual uses a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema.

The first half of Film, a Sound Art considers developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. The second half explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. With restless inventiveness, Chion develops a rhetoric that describes the effects of audio-visual combinations, forcing us to rethink sound film. He claims, for example, that the silent era (which he terms "deaf cinema") did not end with the advent of sound technology but continues to function underneath and within later films. Expanding our appreciation of cinematic experiences ranging from Dolby multitrack in action films and the eerie tricycle of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, a Sound Art showcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.

Collin, Matthew Guerrilla Radio: Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio and Serbia’s Underground Resistance. Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books 2002

This is a book about a group of Belgrade's young idealists and their pirate radio station B92, who began with the naive desire to simply play music, but ended up facing two wars, economic sanctions, violent police and government crackdowns, the attentions of armed gangsters and neo-Nazi politicians, and ultimately became the leaders of an opposition movement forced into exile. Before Milosevic was finally ousted in October 2000, B92 would be shut down and resume broadcasting four times as, through an inspired combination of courage, imagination, and black humour—and a playlist, from The Clash's "White Riot" to Public Enemy's rap manifesto, "Fight the Power," which in sound and spirit, echoed the street fighting in which they sometimes took part—it somehow persisted in disseminating the truth. Matthew Collin knows the founders of the station well and has had extraordinary access to the key personalities and their archives. He first reported on the station as part of a feature on Belgrade's mass street protest in 1996. The book is based on in-depth, first-person interviews and exhaustive background research. "Matthew Collin captures the conviction of a generation whose culture and identity were under siege...."—Independent on Sunday.

Gayraud, Agnès, et al. Dialectic of Pop. Translated by Robin Mackay et al., Urbanomic Media LTD, 2019.

A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths.

In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography.

In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake.

Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognizes its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself."

Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first-century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.

Goodman, Steve, et al. AUDiNT Unsound: Undead. Edited by Steve Goodman et al., Urbanomic, 2019. 

Tracing the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead.

For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound: Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena).

For the past seven years, the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and how frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present.

This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present.

The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe. 

Groth, Sanne Krogh, and Holger Schulze. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art. Edited by Sanne Krogh Groth and Holger Schulze, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound. In musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulent academic critique and aesthetic analysis field. Summoning artists, researchers, curators, and critics, this volume takes note of and reflects the most recent shifts and drifts in Sound Art--rooted in sonic histories and implying future trajectories.

LaBelle, B. (2021). Acoustic justice: Listening, performativity and the work of reorientation. Bloomsbury Academic.

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and be heard, extending toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining listening capacities, leading to what LaBelle terms "poetic ecologies of resonance." Acoustic Justice works at issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, by moving across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of the Deaf voice. Through such transversality, LaBelle captures acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

LaBelle, Brandon. Sonic Agency : Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. Goldsmiths Press, 2018.

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change.

In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and essential book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises through sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict and points to their work as models for a broader movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.