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"The possibility that sounds might be objects, entities, or things is an open question.  However, many theories of sound close the question down via reductive assertions. Some argue that sounds cannot be things because things are autonomous entities whereas sounds are relative. Others argue that sounds cannot be things because things are durable bodies whereas sounds are temporal phenomena. The following essay begins by reviewing and critiquing these arguments as they appear in musicology, sound studies, and philosophy.  Arguments against sound's autonomy are generally motivated by anthropocentric ideologies, which by presuming humans' ontological privilege reduce sounds to human experiences, practices, and conditions.  "

On the seventieth anniversary of the first performance of Cage's 4'33", this issue of Australian Humanities Review features a collection of essays by authors from a range of humanities disciplines who have been willing to adventurously think about, theorise or creatively experiment with the legacy of Cage's work, which, whether praised, censured or misunderstood, has had an undeniable influence on the music and performance that came after it. In the time since its first performance, the aesthetic, cultural and conceptual reach of Cage's 4'33" has been immense. Cage's experimental oeuvre (music, writings, teaching) is internationally significant, having been exported from America to the world, including Australia. The special section includes short essays by Shayne Bowden, Rachel Campbell and James Hazel Maher, Kim Cunio, Dieter Daniels, Richard Elliott, Daniel Fishkin, Mack Hagood, Peter Jaeger, Douglas Kahn, Caleb Kelly, Sally Macarthur, Julian Murphet, David Toop, Shelley Trower and Stephen Whittington.

"ESC is a work of experimental audio-based scholarship combining sound studies, radio history, and environmental criticism. This unique project is a fully open access, fully digital suite of audiographic essays, presented as a ten-part podcast series, combining spoken commentary, clips from classic radio dramas, excerpts from films and television shows, news reports, and the work of contemporary sound artists. A brief written essay on the ESC website provides a helpful introduction and context for this project."

A personal essay about hearing loss, disability, the amplification of the sound of one's body, the way that hearing and mishearing leads to metaphor, and the losses and gains of disability as well as normative sensing.

"Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

"Four years after the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell caused flurries of excitement with another invention, which he described in a series of essays and lectures in the US and Britain during the autumn of 1880. The device was what he called the 'photophone'. It depended upon the discovery made by Willoughby Smith in 1873, during the course of work on the Atlantic undersea telephone cable, that the resistance of the material selenium, which was ordinarily extremely high, in fact varied with the action of light, exposure to light lowering the resistance of the material."

"Walter has created for Transom a new essay called Womb Tone as a companion to his lecture, Dense Clarity - Clear Density, now illustrated here with sound and film clips, detailing Walter's process. "

Bu Kim Cascone "With the advent of cheap digital recording gear, many have taken to recording their environments and presenting it as sound art. Without considering how technology leaches the soul of an environment, much of today's field recording based sound art will ultimately fail to capture the holistic nuance and subtleties found in nature. What this essay calls for is a resurrection and development of the post-digital aesthetic in the form of "Transcendigitalism.""

" Measuring Device with Organs ranges from essay to soundscape, bildungsroman to musical composition. The work begins with a typical "expert listener"-a middle-aged, white audiophile with a passion for classic rock-undergoing a test meant to determine what sound should sound like. Measuring Device with Organs hinges on the recordings used in such tests, conducted by stereo manufacturers and agencies like the International Electrotechnical Commission, reliant on the ability of humans to act like listening machines. As the test proceeds, the expert struggles to train his ears on the frequency response of the audio files, to vanquish the memories evoked by Spanish guitar riffs and snippets of ABBA."

" This essay is about listening to the voice as a social prism of sound that disperses and reflects power. Thus by listening to and for elsewhere at public gatherings, we hear voices at work-in formation-producing an elsewhere by refusing to comply with the sonic demands of a Canadianness based on white settler colonialism, dependent on state-sanctioned multiculturalism, and rendered as silence."

What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of field recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in 2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of field recordings.

"To read Susan Sontag's 2003 essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, with pencil scribbling references to current-day wars is to be expected. Hers is a profound rethinking of the intersection of news, art and contemporary depictions of violence and our memories of them. So, too, could the word "Ferguson" be readily jotted in the margins. Meandering the intersections helps us navigate memory well beyond any of the recent conflagrations between Black citizens and militarized police forces in U.S. cities. "

"Pushing off from experiences in which music hails its listener in terms of communal belonging, this essay tries to productively shift our attention towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent and a solvent of the political experience of antagonism encountered when identification claims us (or fails to claim to us). Sound- not music but the raw immanence of sounds we cannot identify- can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound might help us echo-locate the edges of subjection, and encounter its ontological outside."

"As someone whose entry point into the vast world of musical repertoire has mostly been through collecting records and since the most unusual and unique things are usually the hardest ones to hear live, Maryanne Amacher has always been something of an enigma to me. A composer of vast, space-specific sonic panoramas at crushingly loud volumes, Amacher defies containment and commodification. When Tzadik finally released a CD of her music, I finally thought I was able to experience it. But actually, I hadn't. Two speakers can't really convey what she is doing in space and as an apartment dweller the kinds of volumes she demands would inevitably lead to an eviction. Yet through listening and reading her essays on various subjects, especially her fascinating contribution to a panel on Cage's influence where she spoke about creating a music that is somehow liberated from time, I felt compelled to talk to her. We spent only about an hour in conversation-the unfortunate time constraints of a reality based on schedules-but it felt like it could have gone on forever. And, in some ways, it will…"

"The Listening Reader, edited by Sam Belinfante and Joseph Kohlmaier, brings together a number of essays that explore the role of sound and listening in the context of contemporary art. They engage with the specific timbre that the act of listening, and the paradigm of sound bring to the practice of artists; how this paradigm is present within a broader discourse, including the creative arts, sciences, philosophy and politics; and how art that begins with, or requires listening circulates in the world of the art gallery."

"With this special issue of Seismograf we are happy to present a new format of articles: Audio Papers. Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics."

"This essay was written for the catalog of the exhibition "John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence" at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona."

"Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer's ingenious set of images, which until recently were thought to be lost. "

Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer based in London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. The book engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. It seeks to immerse the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, to establish an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and to promote the notion of a sonic sensibility. Other recent writings include an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011 issue, and an essay on durational radio for Kunstradio ORF Austria. Her blog soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday.

"This essay was written for the catalog of the exhibition "John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence" at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. "