2004
In the 2004 edition of Audio Culture, editors Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner included Max Neuhaus's seminal 1990 essay "Listen" as a cornerstone for the "Sound Art" and "Acoustic Ecology" sections. The anthology frames Neuhaus's "Listen" project as the definitive shift from music (a time-bound performance) to sound works (a focus on the listener's immediate perception of their environment). This aligns perfectly with Blake Johnston's 2019 thesis on "listening to oneself while listening." The book provides the theoretical foundation for Neuhaus's shift toward networked spaces like Auracle (2004). Neuhaus argues that sound is not just "audio," but a means of defining physical and social space. This justifies the "displaced soundscapes" described by Álvaro Barbosa. Nonverbal Communication: Placing Neuhaus alongside theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and R. Murray Schafer, the text highlights the role of the voice as a "pure acoustic signal." This provides the aesthetic context for using Banse and Scherer's vocal profiles to construct a comprehensive instrument that bypasses language in favor of "raw" sonic interaction. Since the book was published the same year Auracle launched, it served as a "manifesto" for the project. It contextualized the technical efforts of Phil Burk (JSyn) and the Extreme Programming methodology (Kent Beck) as modern tools realizing Neuhaus's decades-old vision of a "public sonic space" that exists entirely in the act of collective listening.