This chapter is concerned with sound (or sonic) art, as opposed to the art form known as music. This is, nevertheless, a quite difficult artistic category to describe straightforwardly. There are, for example, no boundaries that divide ‘sound art’ and ‘music’ in any total manner. Rather, the differences emerge through the ways in which the works are defined and presented within a nexus of – to name a few examples – creators, promoters, critics and audiences; how a work travels within particular institutional segments. There are, however, always points where such distinctions collapse, overlap or blur, because a work straddles borders that previously may have policed categorical tidiness.

David Toop argues that, at its most basic level, sound art is ‘sound combined with visual practices’ (Toop 2000: 107), organised in a manner that differentiates it from more traditional practices associated with ‘music’. Such a definition points to the ways in which sound art is a largely multimedia form: a context-specific work that exists within the gallery space (generally perceived as a visual area) or as a site-specific installation. Nevertheless, such a basic definition could be questioned in the sense that there are pieces which often get designated as sound art that are not combined with visual practices, at least not in the conventional sense. For example, Jonty Semper's Kenotaphion (2001) is generally considered to be sound art, though it is a conventional CD release, not an installation: the double CD compiles two-minute silences that have been observed on Armistice Day (Poole 2001: 9).