In this comprehensive book, the author draws together various theoretical threads that have emerged from his years of experience working in music, music-theatre and electroacoustic music. The author addresses communicative issues in the composition of sonic art from a perceptual perspective, searching for criteria for composing music with non-lattice materials which 'work' in some experientially verifiable sense.

Table of contents:

• 1. What is Sonic Art?
• 2. Beyond the Pitch/Duration Paradigm
• 3. Pythagoras, Fourier, Helmholtz: Towards a Phenomenology of Sound
• 4. The Nature of Sonic Space
• 5. Sound Structures in the Continuum
• 6. Gesture and Counterpoint
• 7. Sound Landscape
• 8. Sound-image as Metaphor: Music And Myth
• 9. Is There a Natural Morphology of Sounds?
• 10. Spatial Motion
• 11. Utterance
• 12. The Human Repertoire
• 13. Phonemic Objects
• 14. Language Stream and Paralanguage
• 15. The Group
• 16. Beyond the Instrument: Sound Models