The Electromagnetic Imaginary

Though sound and music are essentially incorporeal aspects of human experience, they are dependent on the latent potentials of matter: bamboo tubes, stretched animal skin, throat-flesh. Even more fundamentally, sound rests upon vibration, the analog fluctuations of that vaporous fluid we call air. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that ocean of vibration became electrified. Just as traditional instruments can be seen as alchemical transformations of earth and air, woods and metals, so can the revolutionary sonic...