Contemporary theorising within the field of sound art practice emphasises the pursuit and function of listening as a central tenet in forming understanding and content. This research goes some way to re-balance this bias by shifting the weight of significance from listening to sounding and its practices. In its vernacular understanding, listening is commonly attributed to the human subject, whereas the potential to sound is shared by both the animate and the inanimate. It is with this in mind that I posit a doing of sound, whether anthropomorphically generated or not, as being crucial in thinking in, through and with sound. In this thesis, I examine a performative materialism of the sonic. I advance the concept of a shared ontology between the sonic and the performative via an original application of what has been called the Performative Turn in art and the humanities, to sound art practice and its related theory. This research contributes a unique merger of concepts that are often considered to be in opposition. In combining theories that stress the primacy of objects with those that foreground agency, I am suggesting procedures for relational and generative sonic pedagogies that differ from currently accepted practices. Moreover, this adaptation moves the relational within these concepts to centre stage, creating a thinking that is disposed toward deed and emergence rather than thingness I expound a Deed-Oriented Ontology (DOO) of the sonic through a conceptual re-purposing of recent trends in philosophy, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism and new materialism. This is predominantly achieved by using outcomes that employ variations upon the theme of performance presentation and lecture-event. The structure of this thesis is such that it makes use of performative-writing practices and materiality (be that of text or sound or performance) as possessing modes of transformation, organisation and knowledge dissemination. Central to this thesis is the idea that sound art is capable of generating its own kind of thinking which is only accessible through practice-led procedures or doing-thinking.

This research proposes the unsound object and intimate space as new approaches to listening to, writing about and performing creative sound works. The writing and the practical works sketch new territory around these two terms to pluralise sound art histories, with the aim of opening up practical discourse between artistic fields. The research begins with musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer’s sound object, but draws on Mladen Dolar’s voice object, Christof Migone’s unsound and Six Years, Lucy Lippard’s account of conceptual art, instead of a strict acousmatic music narrative. A deliberate ‘wandering across borders’ is maintained throughout, to unpick the unsound object and intimate space through live work and ‘writing through’ of texts. My practice shifts between object based sound works, live art performance presentations, and open-ended text works. It tilts at intimate space by operating from the tabletop, from just beyond the page; my practice is made more uncertain and less fixed by its investigation of the unsound object. The project offers this as a positive outcome. In this project, I draw connections between the art object and the sound object, between mesostics and live art practice, between writing and space. These are tentatively offered as overlapping histories, as overlapping methods. Not as fixed Venn diagrams, or word clouds, but part of a flickering, oscillating unmethod that allows for both abstract and concrete, for waves and particles. The unmethod proposed in this project uses words like unshackling, unfixing, unpicking, and untethering to unsettle my practice and writing. The project suggests that destabilising existing definitions offers the potential of sound in silent media, and music beyond sound.

This research contributes to an understanding of curatorial strategy and sound art practices by using an inferential approach to curating. The study uses analysis of the theories and tape experiments of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) to explore curatorial problems occurring within sound-related gallery displays of contemporary art. The study presents a Burroughsian methodology of curatorial practice engaging in “games with space and time” (Mottram 1977) in a manner suggestive of a complex form of mediation between aspects of the “meaning-making process” (Drabble in Graham 2010) relevant to the presentation of an exhibition of sound art. The study examines Burroughs’ project in the ‘60s and early ‘70s in the theoretical framework of curatorial strategy in sound-oriented practices to articulate a domain of meaning-making focused on visitor interactions. By considering interaction with sound as an unstable and unclear process, and privileging the exhibition visitor as the focus of the process of meaning-making in exhibitions, this study presents an ecological approach to curating, advancing studies in ecological approaches to meaning (Clarke 2005 and Gibson 1979), definitions of meaning in relation to Konstantīns Raudive’s experiments with Electronic Voice Phenomena (Raudive 1971 and Banks 2012) and Burroughs’ revision of L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (Hubbard 1950). This study advances practical studies in curatorial theory and Burroughs scholarship, with particular regard to how meaning-making processes might be conceptualised in sound-based artistic domains. To this end it includes the practical example of a sound art exhibition Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs at IMT Gallery, London, in 2010. Through analysis of Burroughs’ project and how it absorbed his understanding of Cubism, Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), and Hubbard, his collaborations with Brion Gysin (1916-1986) and his application of experimental techniques, the study articulates a Burroughsian space as a motivation for experimental curatorial practice.

The ImMApp (Immersive Mapping Application) thesis addresses contemporary and historical sound art from a position informed by, on one hand, post-structural critical theory, and on the other, a practice-based exploration of contemporary digital technologies (MySQL, XML, XSLT, X3D). It proposes a critical ontological schema derived from Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and applies this to pre-existing information resources dealing with sound art. Firstly an analysis of print-based discourses (Sound by Artists. Lander and Lexier (1990), Noise, Water, Meat. Kahn (2001) and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. LaBelle (2006)) is carried out according to Foucauldian notions of genealogy, subject positions, the statement, institutional affordances and the productive nature of discursive formation. The discursive field (the archive) presented by these major canonical texts is then contrasted with a formulation derived from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: that of a 'minor' history of sound art practices. This is then extended by media theory (McLuhan, Kittler, Manovich) into a critique of two digital sound art resources (The Australian Sound Design Project (Bandt and Paine (2005) and soundtoys.net Stanza (1998)). The divergences between the two forms of information technologies (print vs. digital) are discussed. The means by which such digitised methodologies may enhance Foucauldian discourse analysis points onwards towards the two practice-based elements of the thesis. Surface, the first iterative part, is a web-browser based database built on an Apache/MySQIlXML architecture. It is the most extensive mapping of sound art undertaken to date and extends the theoretical framework discussed above into the digital domain. Immersion, the second part, is a re-presentation of this material in an immersive digital environment, following the transformation of the source material via XSL-T into X3D. Immersion is a real-time, large format video, surround sound (5.ln.l) installation and the thesis concludes with a discussion of how this outcome has articulated Foucauldian archaeological method and unframed pre-existing notions of the nature of sound art.

This practice-based thesis aims to expand sound art discourse by considering process in sound art practice through an exploration of artists’ experiences. There is still relatively little debate about or critical reflection on the location or nature of process in contemporary sound art’s discourse. This thesis addresses this lack of debate and reflection by developing a framework through which artists can explore and then communicate their perspectives in order to extend sound art discourse. Three key areas emerge from this approach: process, practice and discourse. This thesis investigates how they relate to and interact with each other. In order to explore process, I have borrowed from and extended concepts from the model of conceptual blending, a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities (2002).1 Through the notion of inputs, which are blended through process into outputs, the model of procedural blending, adapted from conceptual blending, illustrates how new meaning is created, providing a basis for the investigation of process in sound art practice for inclusion in its discourse. This exploration is carried out through a modular approach to methodology, which I have termed Modular Field Methodology. I first examine my own past and current work, which offers me the opportunity directly to observe process within my practice and to observe how new themes and views emerge from an engagement with new inputs. The examination of my past and current work also provides a space to gain a deeper understanding of procedural blending in sound art practice. This ‘introspective approach’ is then calibrated by an investigation of the practice of other artists, through collaborative workshops, interviews and an online magazine, each providing different spaces for a wide range of practitioners’ voices reflecting on the diversity and complexity of multimodal sound art practice.

How is agency distributed “in the field” and how can the practice of field recording critically manifest the relationship between humans and non-humans? This thesis posits an original art practice of field recording based on a perspective I am calling “Inter-agential”. Employing the self-reflexive anthropological turn of the 1970’s as parallel critique throughout, I argue environmental sound art has ignored the politics of observer-subject relations and instead engaged place and sound through divisive legacies of conservation and composition. I propose a hybrid conceptual framework from contemporary sound and anthropological studies that foregrounds issues relating to ethics, agency and representation. These subjects are examined in practice by converting “the field” into a collaborative and contested arena for intervention and performance. The result is a unique and formally diverse body of work that seeks to actively disrupt, critique and re-imagine the ontological foundations of field recording through an original and politicised aesthetics. All practice-based experimentation has been conducted in one fixed location along the North-East Coast of England called South Gare. It is an industrial and ecologically embroiled site, both in terms of its history and present day impact. I situate this site-specific setting through artistic legacies found in Land Art. This context helps to re-imagine modes of documentation, production and subjectivity within field recording and builds a nuanced understanding of the field in relation to the representation of place and sonic experience.

This practice-based PhD – ‘Inter-piece Sampling and Convolution’ – evolved against the background of composers such as Amon Tobin and Monty Adkins, who use techniques and workflows common to both acousmatic and electronica music. The pieces in this thesis are linked through a sustained commitment to working across these two musical contexts and through their relationships to source materials and pulses. Sound materials have been sampled from within the pieces themselves, and materials from older pieces have been convolved with newer sounds, furthering the connections between pieces. The continual feeding-forward of source material promoted the synchronous development of the conceptual tool: Input, Sculpt, Output, which brought about the evolution of intricate diagrams. All of the pieces are for fixed media, and nine of the ten are in 5.1-format surround sound. The complex web of interrelationships created by the process of sampling and convolving material from previous pieces demanded an innovative means of representation. This representation took on a diagrammatic form in order to facilitate the analysis of a sound’s continuous (re)appropriation, explicated within supporting text. The diagrams indicate the extensive use of sampling and convolution to connect pieces, and include embedded hyperlinks to audio at various stages. As a result, textual analysis of techniques and their implications takes place across multiple pieces, and results in a wider scope for individual commentaries. The hyperlinked nature of the diagrams provides a foundation for further research, and a number of conclusions are posited about the use of sampling and convolution across multiple pieces.

This thesis contributes a novel, cross-disciplinary framework to the field of sound studies. It examines how our inherent capacities as listeners are manifested in transitional urban environments, and the primary role of voice as a vehicle for perception in field recording and soundwalking practices. Using the conceptual triad of ‘node, counter-atmosphere and meshwork’ as its analytical device, this research considers the polyphonic physical, personal and social ecologies at play in our encounters within transitional spaces. By doing so, it highlights the importance of sound for countering their functionality and opening them up to a more engaged perception. In its theoretical scope, this conceptual triad draws on and re-contextualises existing terminologies from a variety of disciplines: urban planning and Kevin Lynch’s notion of the node; philosophy and Gernot Boehme’s theory on the atmosphere as well as Gaston Bachelard’s concept of seeping through; anthropology and Tim Ingold’s idea of the meshwork. Coined as a sonic perceptual ecology, this triad is a new analytical tool that is the immediate result of the practice developed as part of this research. Involving three consecutive stages, the work spans across intensive fieldwork, workshops, hybrid telematic soundwalks, radioart pieces, public events and performances engaging with different sites in London and elsewhere. This thesis presents a constellation of original outputs, essential to creating and understanding the novel conceptual framework of the sonic perceptual ecology. This is achieved by testing new methodologies, by analysing, in new terms and through the Sensing Cities interviews series, existing creative work and by developing a portfolio of practice that has been presented as part of commissions, conferences and curated events. Key to these activities is the proposition that we perceive not as authoritative presences but as organisms whose voice is, as Mikhail Bakhtin would suggest, a chain of human and non-human utterances.

Claims for originality in this thesis lie in bringing together many different disciplines in art, music, sound studies and performance. The methodology, contextually indebted to the dialogues of site specific art, performance, and sound improvisation, has emerged as a multi-disciplinary one, informed in part by the study of those artists from the 1960s onwards who actively sought to resist the gallery system. The practice has driven the thesis in developing and continuously testing the requirement to respond uniquely to chosen sites. By using relevant references, instruments, and sonified materials, a compulsion to convey something of the particularity of the site’s associations through sound, is performed on site. In the course of considering the wider implications of a site through both the sound performances and the critical writing, I propose that there are essentially three aspects to identify when working with sound on site. I define these as: the actual the activated the associative The first aspect describes what is essentially inherent to the place, the second what can be encouraged to be ‘sounded’ through physical intervention, and the third outlines and forms what I have coined as the wider material of the site. This term draws on any relevant aspects of the social, physical, historical, anecdotal, and aural associations that a site may proffer. However, it is the notion of the associative that primarily informs the research by providing a methodology for the practice and in proposing a new paradigm of a live, site specific, performed, sound art work. The twenty or so works in the portfolio undertaken hitherto have existed not only as live performances but also in virtual and physical documentation, critical 4 analyses, and in the potential possibilities brought to the form by the response of others. By addressing this new taxonomy of approach in defining the actual, the activated and the associative as a kind of aural ground to the site (borrowing a term from painting), significant live sound art works have been developed to temporarily inhabit a space by exploring this latent material of the site.

New developments in music technology, alongside a more porous understanding of the nature of sound and its performance, have opened experimental and contemporary music to many new expressions since 1945. It might therefore be expected that the revolutionary compositional ingenuity demonstrated by many of female composers shaping this new transmission of music-making would by now be carefully documented in the historiography. Yet this has not been the case, and their absence is symptomatic of a still active antipathy to women entering and participating in professional and artistic arenas that remain structured in gender terms. Taking my title from Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep Listening, my research analyses the compositional strategies of an indicative group of five female composers, with the intention of redressing this knowledge gap. I do this from a practice base, in which interviews with Éliane Radigue, Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Joan La Barbara and Ellen Fullman are analysed through a methodology built from the intersections between psychoanalysis, oral history, and sound studies. From this, I propose the concept of the sonic artefact that results from the methodologically-focused encounter between researcher and narrator. Analysis of the communicative space within which the sonic artefact operates offers, I argue, a new methodology for gleaning ontological meaning from the sonic utterance of speech. This is extended to researchers as a method in which to theorise and to achieve a ‘deeper listening’ that attends to the historical depth of who is making sound and how they might be better heard. The audio interviews made during my research and additional documents share a focus with the Her Noise Archive at the University of the Arts London’s Special Archives and will be lodged there.