If Rhythm Science was about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix—how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound, Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work and compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound and digital media in an information-based society. The topics are as diverse as the contributors: composer Steve Reich offers a memoir of his life with technology, from tape loops to video opera; Miller himself considers sampling and civilization; novelist Jonathan Lethem writes about appropriation and plagiarism; science fiction writer Bruce Sterling looks at dead media; Ron Eglash examines racial signifiers in electrical engineering; media activist Naeem Mohaiemen explores the influence of Islam on hip hop; rapper Chuck D contributes “Three Pieces”; musician Brian Eno explores the sound and history of bells; Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno interview composer-conductor Pierre Boulez; and much more. “Press ‘play,’” Miller writes, “and this anthology says ‘here goes.’”

The CD features Nam Jun Paik, the Dada Movement, John Cage, Sonic Youth, and many other examples of avant-garde music, again mainly sampled from the catalogue of Sub Rosa, like Rhythm Science.
Some more names of writers that contributed:
Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Douglas Kahn, Pauline Oliveros, Ibrahim Quaraishi, Simon Reynolds, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams and Jeff E. Winner.

Published in 2008, 432 pages.
“It’s a lovely eclectic collection that is a nice antidote to the usual way music and the history of music is often categorized into high/low, pop/classical, or black/white. I like Sterling’s analogy between our beloved high tech media and inscrutable indecipherable archaic media like Incanquipus. From Raymond Scott to the hidden racism in digital circuitry to ahistory of easy listening there is enough inspiring weirdness here to fuel some musical fires for a good while.”
—David Byrne