Background Noise follows the development of sound as an artistic medium and illustrates how sound is put to use within modes of composition, installation, and performance. While chronological in its structure, Brandon LaBelle’s book is informed by spatial thinking - weaving architecture, environments, and the specifics of location into the work of sound, with the aim of formulating an expansive history and understanding of sound art. At its center the book presupposes an intrinsic relation between sound and its location, galvanizing acoustics, sound phenomena, and the environmental with the tensions inherent in what LaBelle identifies as sound’s relational dynamic. For the author, this is embedded within sound’s tendency to become public expressed in its ability to travel distances, foster cultural expression, and define spaces while being radically flexible. This second expanded edition includes new chapter about the future of sound art, revisions to the text as well as a new preface by Brandon LaBelle. Intersecting material analysis with theoretical frameworks spanning art and architectural theory, performance studies, and media theory, Background Noise makes the case that sound art should be at the core of contemporary culture.

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sounding and listening, and discusses how sound studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture, street life and sonic technologies, Acoustic Territories opens up a range of critical perspectives--it challenges debates surrounding noise pollution and charts an "acoustic politics of space" by engaging auditory experience as found within particular cultural histories and related ideologies. Brandon LaBelle traces sound culture through a topographic structure: from underground territories to the home, and further, into the rhythms and vibrations of streets and neighborhoods, and finally to the sky itself as an arena of transmitted imaginaries. The new edition includes an additional "global territory" of the relational, positioning acoustics as a range of everyday practices that rework dominant tonalities. Questions of orientation and emplacement are critically raised, reframing listening as multi-modal and intrinsic to resistant socialities and what the author terms "acts of compositioning." The book is fully updated to include new relevant research and references surfacing since 2010, as well as a new preface to the second edition. Acoustic Territories continues to uncover the embedded tensions and potentialities inherent to sound as it exists in the everyday spaces around us.

In this paper we describe the Pleasure of treasure treasure hunt around London’s King’s Cross area. The pleasure of treasure was devised as a response to Richard Wentworth’s exhibition An area of outstanding unnatural beauty, November 2002. Richard Wentworth sought to explore the character of King’s Cross by creating an exhibition space that would provide somewhere both where the overlooked and hidden histories of King’s Cross could be gathered together and also where people from the King’s Cross area could engage with activities that had been lost or overlooked. Similarly, The pleasure of treasure sought to take people around the area with a view to exploring its histories and oddities. More than this, it hoped to open up the area to fresh eyes, capable of seeing the secret treasures that lay there. In keeping with Wentworth’s project, the beauty of King’s Cross lay not only in the process of exploration but also in the chance encounters (of various kinds) that sometimes surprise and sometimes disappoint.

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The project, Phantom Radio, is based on forming a library of radio memory. Collecting stories from 105 individuals from around the world, the library consists of written statements and CDs of all the songs mentioned. Through the project, questions of broadcast technology, and the work of memory, are brought forward. To pursue such questions, the following article maps out the territory explored in the project. Reflecting on various threads, from habits of listening to the effects of music on individual lives, leads to a tracing out of the 'phantasmic' and the 'social' aspects of radio. And further, how music supplies a form of shared ground to the individual instances of unexpected experiences.