The Unreliable Mediator · 06:10:21

To Intercession (2015)

The Unreliable Mediator: Loudspeakers in Sound Art Heard through Music on a Long Thin Wire is a chapter by David Prior published in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art

'Within the array of sounding devices that have been deployed in the making of sound art, the speaker has a special status. Although not ubiquitous, the extent of the speaker’s influence on sound art cannot be underestimated, and yet for many artists the speaker remains an obstinate, unyielding thing, acknowledged for its function but not embraced for its form. Sound art has frequently positioned itself within the discourse of contemporary sculpture and installation art and, as such, both the affordances of sound itself and the materials of its technical apparatus need to be understood as different dimensions of what constitutes its medium. This brief survey of the uses of speakers in sound art uses Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire as a case study in which the speaker is utilized not just for its ability to convey sonic meaning generated elsewhere but also as a thing in its own right' 

Abstract from: 'The Unreliable Mediator:Loudspeakers in Sound Art Heard through Music on a Long Thin Wire from The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art