Review: Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, by Brian Kane

Abstract

Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice , by Brian Kane. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii, 318 pp. The world does not need another history of absolute music, contends Brian Kane, halfway through his excellent and audacious book. Nor, one might add, a reassessment of Pierre Schaeffer's acousmatic theory of musique concrete . Yet Kane does something unexpected and bold: he takes one to prize open and galvanize the other—using the very acuteness of Schaeffer's angle to penetrate familiar terrain in unsettling depth. On the way, his journey takes in a range of exotic staging posts: mysterious subterranean noises in Moodus, Connecticut; the myth of the Pythagorean veil and the akousmatikoi ; invisible orchestras and angelic choirs; Les Paul's impossible guitar sounds; Debbie Reynolds's voice doubling in Singin' in the Rain ; Francis Barraud's painting of Nipper the dog ( His Master's Voice ); Kafka. These are interleaved with razor-sharp readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Lacan, Chion, Nancy, Dolar, Schaeffer himself, and many “Others.” Kane's object is nothing less than a phenomenology and history of listening that ponders the line between sound studies and music. Whether that line is truly abolished is to be determined. Schaeffer's strict definition of the acousmatic as “a sound that one hears without seeing what causes it” (quoted p. 3) comes with a package of associated concepts: …