This bookpresents the first book-length study of ambient sound as a key issue in sound studies and sonic philosophy. Taking a broad, media-philosophical approach, it explores ambient sound as a basic dimension of the sonic environment, sonic technologies, sonic arts and the material staging of listening.Through analyses of key concepts such as surroundability, mediatization, immanence, synthetization and continuous variation, the book elucidates how ambient aspects of sound influence our conceptions of what sound is and how it affects us by exposing sound’s relation to basic categories such...