Understanding sound art practice: a multidisciplinary approach

Sound art has a fragmented scholarship struggling to find appropriate terminology to understand and explain itself. In this context the practitioner’s perspective is often marginalised. This thesis seeks to develop new perspectives on contemporary sound practice, informed by a multi-disciplinary approach to auditory scholarship and interviews with Australian sound practitioners. The model that emerges describes an ecology of contemporary sound art where practitioners continually negotiate disciplinary and institutional boundaries while articulating distinctive models of listening and conceptions of sound. This thesis proposes a theoretical approach to sound art that recognises its interdisciplinarity as well as a distinctive engagement with the embodied experience of sound and listening.