Abstract
In the introduction, I present ambient sound as a key ‘problem’ in sound studies and sonic philosophy to underline the massive and inescapable, yet still partly ignored, influence of ambient sound in the general history of sound, art and listening. Ambient sound is distinguished as the affective production of surroundability, the sensation of being surrounded by sound. On this basis, I propose a clear distinction between ecology, atmosphere and ambient sound as constituting three basic—distinct but interrelated—affective dimensions of the sonic environment. In addition, drawing on Gilles Deleuze, James Gibson, Don Ihde and others, I present the book’s overall materialist, ‘onto-aesthetic’ approach to the study of sound and listening as informed by a basic ‘double dimensionality’ between surroundability and directionality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Sloterdijk (2004, p. 521); my translation from German of “Modernität, das heisst: Auch der Hintergrund wird Produkt.”
- 2.
For example, the experience-oriented economic perspective that still suffuses today’s cultural industries is, as B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore argued in their influential book from 1999, in large part distinguished by the commercial tendency to think and stage its products as an “environmental relationship” (Pine and Gilmore 1999, p. 31). “No wonder,” they noted, “so many companies today wrap experiences around their existing goods and services to differentiate their offerings. […] They can enhance the environment in which clients purchase and / or receive the service, layer on inviting sensations encountered while in that company-controlled environment, and otherwise figure out how to better engage clients to turn the service into a memorable event” (ibid., p. 15). Taking another approach, Yves Citton has more recently argued how contemporary societies have moved from attention economy to a broader and more affectively complex “ecology of attention.” The current “ecosystem,” in which media, communication, entertainment and commerce take place and blend, Citton argues, “functions as an echo chamber, whose reverberations ‘occupy’ our minds (in the military sense of the term): most of the time, we think (in our ‘heart of hearts’) only what is made to resonate in us in the media vault by the echoes with which it surrounds us. In other words, media enthralments create an ECHOSYSTEM, understood as an infrastructure of resonances conditioning our attention to what circulates around, through and within us” (Citton 2017, p. 29).
- 3.
For an analysis of the basic, yet contradictory, habituation demanded and nurtured by contemporary media between the new and the same, the exciting and the boring, control and addiction, see Chun (2016). For a discussion of media as elemental habitats, see Peters (2015). As Peters argues: “In the life sciences, ‘media’ already means gels and other substances for growing cultures, a usage growing from the older environmental meaning of medium, and in a similar spirit we can regard media as enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life, including other media. […] We are back to the age-old […] communication environment in which media have become equipment for living in a more fundamental way” (2015, p. 3–5).
- 4.
According to John Durham Peters, the idea “that media are message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history. […] The elemental legacy of the media concept is fully relevant in a time when our most pervasive surrounding environment is technological and nature […] is drenched with human manipulation. In a time when it is impossible to say whether the nitrogen cycle or the Internet is more crucial to the planet’s maintenance, I believe we can learn much from a judicious synthesis, difficult though it be, of media understood as both natural and cultural. If media are vehicles that carry and communicate meaning, then media theory needs to take nature, the background to all possible meaning, seriously” (Peters 2015, p. 2).
- 5.
As Casey O’Callaghan argues, “sounds are distal events in which a medium is disturbed or set into motion by the activities of a body or interacting bodies” (O’Callaghan 2017, p. 3). And later: “Sounds are public occurrences in which a moving object or interacting bodies disturb a surrounding medium” (ibid., p. 8). While I am in general agreement with O’Callaghan in his realist (and implicitly ecological) understanding of sound as distal mediatic disturbance, his general philosophy of sound, however, is arguably somewhat weakened by the ignorance of (the use of) technology and the mediatic complexity it brings forth. By contrast, Brian Kane (2014), discussing the ideas of Pierre Schaeffer, also argues for an understanding of sound as an evental relationship between cause, source, effect and medium, but he does so precisely to stress the complex role of technology in mediating, and potentially disturbing, this very relationship. As we shall see, the ‘ecological’ relations between a sound’s cause, source and effect are, in a media-ecological perspective, always also potentially synthetic, phantasmagoric and deceptive, and artificial operability and manipulability is part of its nature. In other words, all aspects of a sound—cause, source, effect, medium—are ‘effects’ and can be deployed and manipulated as such to control the affective potentials of sound. Following Mack Hagood, we can thus distinguish three different sonic potentials: “(1) sound is mediated as mechanical waves in an environmental medium, such as the air; (2) sound can also be mediated and altered as a signal through electroacoustic and digital processes of transduction and signal processing; and (3) sound is also mediatic in itself, a sensory-spatial process of interaction though which subjects and objects emerge in modes of affective relation. Through the first potential, subjects and objects make sound. Through the third potential, sound makes subjects and objects. Using technologies we call electronic media, subjects leverage the second potential of signal processing as they attempt to control the modes of affectivity enacted through the first and third potentials” (Hagood 2019, p. 27).
- 6.
I introduce the term matter-medium, a concept I will develop further throughout the book, in order to stress the coupling of the elemental materiality of environmental mediums and the mediatic environmentality of elemental matter. The elemental dimension of matter-medium indicates the flexible, dynamic properties of environmental mediums. It is in this respect somewhat similar to what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘molecular’ (versus the stable, rigid properties of the ‘molar’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The elemental and molecular, of course, do not designate any ‘naturalness’ of media. Rather, it refers to a state of granular dynamics and flexibility in a world in which “any distinction between nature and technology is becoming blurred.” (Deleuze 1995, p. 155). As Alexander Galloway and Eugene Tacker argue, following Deleuze, the ambient and environmental aspects of contemporary networked media technologies and informational protocols are in part a direct result of their basic elemental nature. “The elemental,” they write, “is this ambient aspect of networks, the environmental aspect—all the things that we as individuated human subjects or groups do not directly control or manipulate. The elemental is not ‘the natural’, however (a concept that we do not understand). The elemental concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level to the macro, the ways in which a network phenomenon can suddenly contract, with the most local action becoming a global pattern, and vice versa. The elemental requires us to elaborate an entire climatology of thought” (Galloway and Thacker 2007, p. 157). For a more elaborate analysis of space as elemental matter, see also Schmidt (2017).
- 7.
Spitzer (1942a, p. 2). To be more exact, ambire was used as a translation of the Greek verb periēchein, which means to ‘contain’ or ‘go around’ (peri ~ around + ēchein ~ to hold; the latter, ēchein, also being the root of the word ‘echo’). Periēchon—a word that was never continued directly in other languages—was a central concept in antique philosophy, first of all in Aristotle’s cosmology where it referred to the cosmic all-encompassing space, and to surrounding space more generally.
- 8.
Spitzer (1942a, b). In the later history of the concept of the ambient, Spitzer notes, “this word cannot be separated from that of medium = milieu” (Spitzer 1942a, p. 2). As an example, Spitzer describes how Isaac Newton’s concept ‘ambient medium’ was translated into French as milieu ambient (ibid., p. 1). He later concludes that ambiens and medium “have come to have a strange and indissolvable relationship: indissolvable purely, yet never constant or restful. They have met from time to time (even in Greek the περιέχον [periēchon] was the μέσον [méson ~ middle, medium] of perception), perhaps just to touch each other, and as if electrified by this contact, each starts anew in a direction of its own” (Spitzer 1942b, p. 199).
- 9.
To highlight just a few prominent examples, we can consider the implicit, partial blurring of the terms environmental, ambient, ambience and atmosphere in Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (2007); for instance in his description of the book’s key term “ambient poetics” as “a way of conjuring up a sense of a surrounding atmosphere or world” (Morton 2007, p. 22). A more direct and explicit equation of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘ambience’ in environmental aesthetics is found in Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics (2007). And as an example of a consistent translation of the French ambiance into the English ‘atmosphere’ in a key philosophical text, see Jean Baudrillard’s Le système des objets (1968) and The System of Objects (1996). For an extended discussion of the distinctions between ambient, ambience and atmosphere in relation to sound, see Lacey (2022, p. 87–96). And for a discussion of the same conceptual distinction in relation to aesthetic culture in general, see McCormack (2018, p. 140, 223n).
- 10.
Sterne (2013); Guillebaud (2017, p. 3). Schafer’s work has been widely criticized beyond the scope of my present argument. For example, Sterne (2003) and several others have drawn attention to Schafer’s contempt of technological reproduction because it, according to Schafer, promotes a state of ‘schizophonia’, and to his anti-modern preference for acoustic hi-fi sounds (conceptualized, at least in part, with a wittingly intended contradiction in terms). Schafer has also been criticized for promoting a bias towards special types of soundscapes observable in, for instance, his “personal aversion to urbanism” (Toop 2004, p. 62), or in what Dylan Robinson describes as a latent racism and cultural appropriation in Schafer’s work (Robinson 2020, p. 1). In addition, mainly because of soundscape’s connotations to visuality, flatness and distance, Guillebaud proposes a distinction between soundscape and sonic “ambiance/milieu/Umwelt” (Guillebaud 2017, p. 3–5). Although my perspective and aims are more philosophical and aesthetic compared to Guillebaud’s ethnographic approach, I will maintain a similar distinction between soundscape and ambient sound. Although soundscape was indeed intended by Schafer as a broad concept for the sonic environment in all its aspects, and despite the fact that “the term is everywhere in sound studies” (Sterne 2013, p. 181), I prefer for the most part to use and develop other concepts in order to avoid the ambiguities and undesirable connotations surrounding the term.
- 11.
As Schafer suggests: “What the soundscape analyst must do first is to discover the significant features of the soundscape, those sounds which are important either because of their individuality, their numerousness or their domination” (Schafer 1994, p. 9).
- 12.
According to Jürgen Hasse, atmospheres are perceived “as an affective tone of a place. [...] They communicate something about the distinct qualities of a place in a perceptible manner, they tune us to its rhythm” and “let us comprehend without words how something is around us. Therefore, atmospheres are also indicators of social situations” (Hasse 2014, p. 215).
- 13.
I have explored and developed this understanding of sonic atmosphere in more detail in Schmidt (2019).
- 14.
For an excellent comparative analysis of the environment in Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze/Guattari, see Buchanan (2008). Gibson summarizes his idea of environmental perception as something which takes place in, and is in part conditioned by, a surrounding material medium in Gibson (1986, p. 16–19).
- 15.
As Uexküll writes, “the space peculiar to each animal, wherever that animal may be, can be compared to a soap-bubble which completely surrounds the creature at a greater or less distance. The soap-bubble of the extended constitutes for the animal the limit of what for it is finite, and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity” (Uexküll 1926, p. 42). See also Uexküll (2010, p. 69–70), where Uexküll further expands upon the soap bubble image. Interestingly, Susanne K. Langer later translates Uexküll’s Umwelt into “ambient” (Langer 1967, p. 282–284). Langer’s notion of Umwelt as ambient denotes, in Eldritch Priest’s words, “a monadic surround or vital territory defined by the way an organism’s activities filter out deleterious or irrelevant influences” (Priest 2013, p. 50n).
- 16.
Spitzer (1942b, p. 194). With the biological and sociological notions of the milieu/environment in the nineteenth century by Comte, Taine and others, Spitzer argues, the “‘surrounding element’” becomes “that which environs, not an inert substance, as in physics, but a living being; milieu ambiant represents the element in which an organism lives and upon which it depends for sustenance” (ibid., p. 175). And as he later concludes: “Also important, however, is the new emphasis on the mi of milieu: this now reflects a subjective attitude of being ‘in the midst of, surrounded by’ […]. What was once itself ‘in the middle,’ ‘a middle place,’ now becomes a place in-the-middle-of-which one is! After all its various cycles [middle place → intermediate point → place → ‘golden means’ → medium of communication → element considered as a factor → surrounding element → environment considered as a factor → the place surrounding us, in the middle of which we are], the word has come again to have a ‘middle’ meaning. The circle is completed” (ibid., p. 193–194).
- 17.
To accentuate a few examples: Douglas Kahn notes how sound “is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences. […] Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality” (Kahn 1999, p. 27). And in a similar vein, Karen Collins describes how sound’s enveloping capacities have been used “to refer to the sense of sonic spaciousness, the subjective immersion of the listener, the fullness of sound images around a listener, the sense of being enveloped by reverberant sound, and the sense of being surrounded by sound. I define envelopment as the sensation of being surrounded by sound or the feeling of being inside a physical space (enveloped by that sound)” (Collins 2013, p. 54). For a further discussion of the historical conception of sound as inherently spatial due to its vibratory, propagative and reflective nature, see Gascia Ouzounian (2020, p. 3–7).
- 18.
Sterne (2003, p. 15). I will return to Sterne’s audiovisual litany in more detail later and discuss its implications for the notion of ambient sound.
- 19.
Yet, since evolution has in part predisposed humans to frontal vision (in contrast, for example, to animals with omnidirectional vision like deer, horses and rabbits), visual physiologists have, according to Gibson, mainly studied the act of looking-at and tended to overlook acts of looking-around. This, Gibson argues, is in part due to habits of cultural practice since “we modern, civilized, indoors adults are so accustomed to looking at a page or a picture, or through a window, that we often lose the feeling of being surrounded by the environment, our sense of the ambient array of light” (Gibson 1986, p. 203). This claim, however, is arguably challenged, and quite distinctly so, by historical developments in modern urbanized and mediatized culture (Schmidt 2013; Crary 1990, 2001, 2013).
- 20.
Directionality and surroundability are not only noetic acts of the intentional mind, to use the phenomenological vocabulary Ihde adopts from Husserl, but possess a noematic correlate in the phenomenal world: “Both these dimensional aspects of auditory presence [directionality and surroundability] are constant and copresent, but the intentional focus and the situation varies the ratio of what may stand out. There is also a noematic difference in relation to what kind of sound may most clearly present itself as primarily surrounding and primarily directional without losing its counterpart” (Ihde 2007, p. 77–78).
- 21.
The term ‘onto-aesthetics,’ it should be noted, is not originally coined by Kane (as he claims, taking inspiration from Nelson Goodman). It is a term that is applied widely by Deleuze scholars and in Deleuzian inspired scholarship—along with similar terms such as ‘onto-ethics,’ ‘onto-epistemology’ and ‘onto-ethology’ (Alliez 2004; Zepke 2005; Buchanan 2008; Hetrick 2019)—to emphasize the aesthetic potentials implied in Deleuze’s realist, materialist, non-subjective, non-representational, and in some respects anti-phenomenological, philosophy.
- 22.
For Deleuze, sensation and the sensible is not a capacity of the sensing subject, but something which transcends it as a potential (onto-aesthetic) ‘effect’, embedded in the empirical fabric of worldly being: “It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an ‘effect,’ that phenomena flash their meaning like signs” (Deleuze 1994, p. 56–57).
- 23.
Ambient sound, and the tension between directionality and surroundability, is thus arguably a central part of the general historical development of modern Western culture, which includes key issues related to the onto-aesthetic management and regulation of attention. For instance, as Jonathan Crary argues, since the nineteenth century “Western modernity has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for ‘paying attention,’ that is, for a disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli. That our lives are so thoroughly a patchwork of such disconnected states is not a ‘natural’ condition but rather the product of a dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years. Nor is it insignificant now at the end of the twentieth century that one of the ways an immense social crisis of subjective dis-integration is metaphorically diagnosed is as a deficiency of ‘attention’” (Crary 2001, p. 1).
Bibliography
Alliez, Eric. 2004. The Signature of The World: Or, What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? London: The Athlone Press.
Augoyard, Jean-François. 2004. Vers une esthétique des ambiances. In Ambiances en débats, ed. Pascal Amphoux, Jean-Paul Thibaud, and Grégoire Chelkoff, 17–30. Bernin: À la Croisée (Collection Ambiances, Ambiance).
Baudrillard, Jean. 1968. Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1996. The System of Objects. London: Verso.
Böhme, Gernot. 1995. Atmosphäre. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp Verlag.
———. 2001. Aisthetik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
———. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London: Routledge.
Buchanan, Brett. 2008. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environment of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Albany: State Univerxity of New York Press.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2016. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Citton, Yves. 2017. The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Collins, Karen. 2013. Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
———. 2001. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
———. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London and New York: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3–7.
———. 1994. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Grimshaw, Mark, and Tom Garner. 2015. Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Guillebaud, Christine. 2017. Introduction: Multiple Listenings: Anthropology of Sound Worlds. In Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, ed. C. Guillebaud, 1–18. New York and London: Routledge.
Hagood, Mack. 2019. Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Hansen, Mark B.N. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Hasse, Jürgen. 2014. Atmospheres as Expressions of Medial Power. Lebenswelt 4 (1): 214–229.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hetrick, Jay. 2019. Lazzarato’s Political Onto-Aesthetics. In Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism, ed. Maurizio Lazzarato, ix–xxv. Edited and translated by J. Hetrick. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hörl, Erich. 2017. Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking. In General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. E. Hörl, 1–74. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2015. Sound Studies Without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn. Sound Studies 1 (1): 2–21.
Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2013. Against Ambience. New York: Bloomsbury.
Lacey, Jordan. 2022. Urban Roar: A Psychophysical Approach to the Design of Affective Environments. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Langer, Susanne K. 1967. Mind: An Essay on Human Feelings. Vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
McCormack, Derek P. 2018. Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
O’Callaghan, Casey. 2017. Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: Deep Listening Publications.
Ouzounian, Gascia. 2020. Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Priest, Eldritch. 2013. Felt as Thought (Or, Musical Abstraction and the Semblance of Affect). In Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. Marie Thompson and Ian Briddle, 45–63. London: Bloomsbury.
Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.
Schmidt, Ulrik. 2013. Det ambiente [The Ambient]. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
———. 2017. Space as Elemental Medium: Architecture, Screen and Topological Space. In Architecture, Drawing, Topology, ed. C. Dinesen, I. Hyams, M. Meldgaard, A. Michelsen, and H. Oxvig, 19–30. Baunach: AADR.
———. 2019. Sound as Environmental Presence: Towards an Aesthetics of Sonic Atmospheres. In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, ed. Knakkegaard Grimshaw and Hansen, 517–534. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schrimshaw, Will. 2017. Immanence and Immersion. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2004. Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Spitzer, Leo. 1942a. Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics [Part 1]. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3(1): 1–42.
———. 1942b. Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics [Part 2]. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3(2): 169–218.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2013. Soundscape, Landscape, Escape. In Soundscapes of the Urban Past. Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, ed. Karin Bijsterveld, 181–194. Bielefeld: trancript Verlag.
Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2011a. A Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances. Journal of Sonic Studies 1, 1. Unpaginated: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/220589/220590.
———. 2011b. The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances. Senses and Society 6 (2): 203–215.
———. 2011c. The Three Dynamics of Urban Ambiances. In Sites of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, ed. Brandon LaBelle and Claudia Martinho, vol. 2, 43–53. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.
———. 2015. The Backstage of Urban Ambiances: When Atmospheres Pervade Everyday Experience. Emotion, Space and Society 15: 39–46.
———. (2017a). Foreword. In The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Gernot Böhme, and Jean-Paul Thibaud, 1–3. London: Routledge.
———. 2017b. Afterword: The Sonic Attunement of Social Life. In Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound, ed. C. Guillebaud, 225–232. New York and London: Routledge.
———. 2020. A Brief Archaeology of the Notion of Ambiance. Unlikely, 6. Unpaginated: https://unlikely.net.au/issue-06/notion-of-ambiance.
Toop, David. 2004. Haunted Weather. London: Serpent’s Tail.
von Uexküll, Jakob. 1926. Theoretical Biology. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner.
———. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schmidt, U. (2023). Introduction. In: A Philosophy of Ambient Sound. Palgrave Studies in Sound. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-99-1754-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-1755-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)