Audio Arts began, as a magazine of a new and special kind in 1973 and
was the invention of two artists,William Furlong and Barry Barker.
It was made possible by the newly widening availability of a specific technology, the cassette tape. What it set out to do, and what it subsequently discovered could be done, were thus consequential upon new possibilities of sound storage and distribution.
What began as a simple magazine became a work of great originality and considerable flexability, a work which continues to grow and ramify, which has extended the scope of sound within the ambit of art and amplified and augmented the discourse through which art achieves its meanings.
Whilst the written word is privileged in the discourse by its relative permanence, speech itself remains a primary mode of human communication, with its own irreducable features and characteristics, and central to the living continuum of what Michael Oakeshott called "the conversation of mankind".
