An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present

Marcel Duchamp famously championed a "non-retinal" visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp's conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself-or as the unwanted child of music-artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the...