With the advent of optical film recording and improvements in phonographic recording in the 1920s, a number of artists in Europe and the United States began arguing for the possibility of a new audiophonic art. The argument for sound art was quite different from the ones usually associated with the coming of sound to film, in that it existed between, among, and potentially beyond the given artistic practices of music, literature, and radio, and was not constrained to be either an improvement or a debasement of cinema alone. By the mid-1930s the question was raised, and kept on being asked until mid-century, as to why these technological possibilities had not been artistically exploited.-Douglas Kahn Film: Romance Sentimentale by Grigori Alexandrov, Sergei Eisenstein (1930, B&W, 16mm, From Em Gee). Audio: Weekend by Walter Ruttmann (1928); The City Wears a Slouch Hat, radio play by John Cage and Kenneth Patchen (1942); Imaginary Landscape No. 1 by John Cage (1939); examples of musique concrete by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1948-1951). Douglas Kahn, artist and historian of the media arts, co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992), lives in Thirroul, New South Wales, Australia.