Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013) addresses the trade between sound and naturally occurring electromagnetism in aesthetics and the arts, from telecommunications in the last quarter of the nineteenth century through science and the arts in the twentieth century. The book offers fundamental re-readings of historical media theory, the relations of art and science, and the histories of electronic and experimental music, and introduces a range of new concepts to accommodate the findings of detailed historical research.
Douglas Kahn is a professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales. His books include Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), Source: Music of the Avant-garde, edited with Larry Austin (University of California Press, 2011), and Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2012). Kahn was a recipient of a 2006–2007 Guggenheim Fellowship for research on the historical discovery of natural radio.