Introduction

Sound accompanies the life of human beings as never before: everything happens as if the spaces in which we live had been fitted out with a permanent sound system, causing a hypertrophy of our sound environment. Whether a question of music or surrounding noises, one of the reasons leading to speaking about sound is that this auditory phenomenon, whose omnipresence we have just stressed, enjoys a certain autonomy. Thus, with the technologies of sound reproduction, was a new culture born, which can be described as ‘audio’. Music has profoundly contributed to this refocussing on sound. From Debussy to contemporary music in this early 21st century, from rock to electronica, from the sound objects of the earliest musique concrète to current electroacoustic music, from the Poème électronique of Le Corbusier-Varèse-Xenakis to the most recent inter-arts attempts, sound has become one of the major wagers – if not the major wager – of music. Everything has happened as if music had begun a change of paradigm: we are going from a musical culture centred on the note to a culture of sound.