he arts today are full of sounds. This, of course, is not an entirely new situation. Indeed, it could be claimed that the entire 20th century was saturated in sound (Kahn, 1999). Or even that the 18th and 19th centuries in Western culture constituted an early modern age of ‘ensonicment’ – parallel to the Age of Enlightenment – where sound became inescapable as an object for knowledge and experience (Sterne, 2003).