Brian Kane is Assistant Professor of Music at Yale University and a founding editor of the journal nonsite.org. His research specializes in contemporary music, sound art, sound studies/auditory culture, histories of listening, and intersections between music and philosophy.

"Much in this substantive book will resonate with the reader after the concluding page is turned. Recommended." --Choice

"Sound Unseen is both successful and provocative precisely because of these constructive dissonances. It is a rare book that can put thinkers as diverse as P. F. Strawson or Bertrand Russell on the same page with Derrida or Heidegger, especially with Kane's unassuming clarity. Furthermore, Kane shows how music studies and philosophy can speak to each other when they are conceived as mutually supplemental--questions about sound infect philosophical questions, and thus a musical answer becomes a philosophical answer. Finally, Kane's tone deserves special mention, as it untangles knotty philosophical questions with remarkably accessible language: despite the density of his topics, his prose treads lightly and patiently, requiring little philosophical acumen yet rewarding those who may have it."--Music Theory Spectrum

"Kane uncovers a history of acousmatic sound independent of the legacy of Schaeffer and Pythagoras in order to articulate a rather distinct approach to the study of sound that transcends the divisions between musicology and sound studies...[Sound Unseen] is an essential text for scholars of the philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and phenomenology." --Journal of Sonic Studies

"Kane's methodology is multi-disciplinary, analysing a variety of cases."--Neural

"Brian Kane...has in Sound Unseen written the definitive explanatory tract on the acousmatic."--The Wire

"Sound Unseen represents a significant contribution to the field of voice studies...Brian Kane succeeds in developing a cogent and flexible explanatory paradigm for acousmatic sound that is clear without being reductive. Kane's account of acousmatic sound allows one to situate the practices of listening within their historical and cultural contexts...Scrupulously researched and conceptually virtuosic, Sound Unseen asks us to rethink the way we listen."--Journal of Musicological Research

"Kane effectively decenters the privileged position of Schaefferian accounts in present discourse and opens the door to a broader survey of acousmatic listening practices spanning a variety of sociohistorical situations...Kane's traversal of the transdisciplinary landscape is graceful and his approach offers a healthy perspective for the field of music research more generally...Without doubt, Kane's book makes a significant contribution to existing literature on acousmatic sound, and it is necessary reading for anyone interested in exploring the fertile intersection of music, sound, and philosophy."--Music Theory Online

"Brian Kane's Sound Unseen: Sound in Theory and Practice directly questions the material constitution of sonic phenomena; however, Kane's methodology is theoretical rather than historical... Upon first blush the book appears topically focused on the work of French composer Pierre Schaeffer and the school of musique concrete; however, its major contributions are to twentieth-century histories of aesthetics and the senses...Kane is also interested in the ways in which incidental subjectivity is interpolated into technologies. For Kane, musical transcendence is revealed time and again to be a phantasmagoric effect of techné, in which the means of production are eclipsed, resulting in a suprahuman category." Contemporary European History