This exploratory talk will follow from Douglas Kahn’s most recent book, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013). The book, over a decade in the making, is a fundamental reworking in the histories of science, communications, music and the arts to account for the incursion of electromagnetism into culture from the nineteenth century to the present. It covers such figures as Thomas Watson, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Joyce Hinterding, and Alvin Lucier, Kahn’s former teacher. Investigating the trade between acoustics and electromagnetism in aesthetics and the arts poses questions for new approaches in the arts, ecology and media where sound is but one energy among others. Earth Sound Earth signal is available for purchase online from the University of California Press, or in-person at the NGV shop.