The Introduction to Volume 2 of The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination serves three purposes. First, it broadly sets out the aims and arc of the handbook and in particular its multidisciplinary scope. Second, it describes the handbook’s genesis and the principles that guided its development. Third, the Introduction lays out the content of each of the five parts of the second volume (“Musical Performance,” “Systems and Technologies,” “Psychology,” “Aesthetics,” and “Posthumanism”) and briefly summarizes each chapter.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination is a two-volume anthology that covers the topic of imagination in the context of sound and music. There are seventy chapters in ten parts across two volumes that present thinking and research on the topic from a broad multidisciplinary perspective, and the fields of study represented include (but are not limited to): music (composition, improvisation, philosophy, therapy, and so forth); sound studies; acoustics and bioacoustics; cognition and neurology; psychology; literature, poetry, and comics; heritage studies; anthropology; branding and advertising; audio technology; film studies; computer games and virtual reality; and aesthetics. Volume 1 of the handbook contains thirty-nine chapters organized across five parts (“Foundations,” “Society and Identity,” “Language,” “Image,” and “Space and Place”).

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Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard takes issue with the objectification and quantification of (and often outright attempts to eliminate) imprecision and subjectivity in the natural sciences, particularly in acoustics and the field of audio testing. Instead, he argues, experiences of vagueness and ambiguity are essential to an imagining of sound, where that imagination aids in the experiencing of an external world. Such imagination, Grimshaw-Aagaard contends, performs a vital role in the emergence of perceptual hypotheses about the external world and thus the presence of our selves in the context of the nonself that is the external world.