“Then it is possible to step back yet again and describe how the constitution of an electromagnetic plenitude was already underway during the twentieth century in the realm of sound synthesis, and how it related to notions of nature, control, and relinquishment of control in modernist and experimental electronic music as “more new sounds” became “more new signals.” Both naturalist and modernist plenitudes of surround sound became urban, terrestrial, and extraterrestrial environments of energetic fields and waves, as more objects took on currents, cities were saturated, and reception broadened. The expanse from brainwaves to outer space thus serves as an allegory for the points, sweeps, and scattering of electrical and electromagnetic energies wherever they occur, from the microtemporal voltage differences in digital circuits, back in time to the cosmic corners of the universe, many of them audible in more new sounds and ways of listening.”
Read: introduction to Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal