Sounding Art is a sort of travel guide to listening—and, according to Katharine Norman, listening (really listening) is the key to fully appreciating the emerging world of Sonic Art. The form of her book perfectly mirrors the playful, profound and often accidental nature of our individual sonic journeys. Sounding Art is a significant contribution to our understanding of sound in contemporary culture and should be required reading for students and practitioners in fields as diverse as Music, Architecture, Media, Sociology and Film.

Andrew Deakin, Sonic Arts, Middlesex University, UK.

Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in two works for sound alone

A chapter in Music, electronic media and culture, ed. Simon Emmerson. UK: Aldershot and USA: Burlington, Vermont - Ashgate.

An exploration of works by Lansky (Things She Carried) and Ferrari (Presque Rien avec Filles), which uses experimental writing within the text itself to explore analogies between fictional processes in writing and works for sound.

A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound Contemporary Music Review, vol 15 Parts 1-2, ISBN 3-7186-5932-8 (1996), Taylor and Francis (formerly published by Gordon and Breach/Harwood) issue editor Katharine Norman.

Contributors: Katharine Norman, Barry Truax, Alistair Riddell, Luke Windsor, Ben Watson, Jean-Claude Risset, John Young, Luc Ferrari, Jon Appleton, James Pritchett, with an accompanying CD of musical examples. ORDERING INFO: this journal issue is now published under the auspices of Taylor and Francis. Good luck in negotiating their web page or ordering system. They sometimes prefer to say it's out of print, or that it's an ebook - neither is the case.

Summary - The journal issue is concerned with aesthetic issues in computer music/recorded sound in music, covering a wide range of composers and approaches, from Cage to Zappa. My own contribution is an extended paper entitled Real-world Music as Composed Listening, which you can download here.

Realworld Music (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton 1993)

Summary - The dissertation explores the aesthetic, philosophical and listening implications of a documentary approach to tape music composition. I see this approach as fundamentally different from that of classical musique concrète. The first chapter suggests 'categories' for the way we may listen creatively in real life, and transfer these stances to musical listening. Subsequent chapters draw on comparisons and analogies from oral storytelling traditions, Eisensteinian film theory and modern poetic thought. I discuss a variety of pieces by composers such as Risset, Ferrari, Lansky and Lucier, and also some of my own compositions. NB a revised version of some of this dissertation is published in A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound (see above).

Telling Tales, in Timbre Composition in Electroacoustic MusicContemporary Music Review

1994, vol. 10, Part 2 pp 103-9. ISBN 3-7186-5572-1 London: Taylor and Francis (formerly published by Gordon and Breach/Harwood)

Summary - Taking models offered by the oral storytelling tradition as its central focus, this paper explores an analogy between the intentions of storytelling and the performing activity of tape music composers, who use 'realworld' sounds - that is, candid recordings of everyday life - as a means to reflect on human experience. By inviting a restructuring of both ordinary and more traditional 'musical' listening stances, this 'realworld music' reveals an approach to composition primarily concerned with the dynamic, experiential contributions of both listener and composer

Other publications

• “Canadian Music and Performing Arts,” encyclopedia entry for The World and its Peoples
  (Brown Reference Group).
• “Classical Music and Opera,” extended entry in USA 1950s, encyclopedia series (Brown
  Reference Group, 2005).
• “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio,” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and
  Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, and New York: Grove, 2001.
• “Electronic Music,” extended entry in Encarta Encyclopedia (1995– ), World-English Edition
  (Microsoft CD-ROM).
  

For several years I made my part-time living writing reference materials and materials for education, leisure and other nonfiction commercial publications.