“… In contemporary discussions of the body in space, of information highways and virtual realities, radiant sound establishes a `ground’ in the discourse of the future - be it utopian or dystopian - built from sound’s long history of transmission (telephony, radiophony) and `spirit’ (electrified by composers such as Cage, Varese and Stockhausen). This `ground’ has also been adopted to some extent by the contemporary philosophers Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard, who use aural, spatial and incinderal metaphors to raise questions about being, technology, and the future. Thus radiant sound becomes a figure in different but related cultural fields: as a trope for many of the great modernist reconciliations, its history in organicism, romanticsm and individualism, provides a model for the individual dispersed across the electronic field. However, in the less beatifically inclined era of postmodernism, the representation of sound as radiant contains a strong cultural ambivalence towards the twentieth century, with its massive technological upheavals, its utopian promises and failures and its shameful record of war. In this context, the radiance of radiant sound is filled with darker connotations - for just as atomic warfare records the human form as shadows on a wall, the technological inscription and transmission of sound across space is seen to leave deathly traces of the body and of nature in the disembodied sound it produces…” From A Philosophonics of Space: Sound, Futurity and the End of the World by Frances Dyson.