Sten Hanson has described sound poetry as a combinaton of the exactness of literature and the time manipulation of music. As the result of a direction inward since the 16th century with the decline of manuscript culture and the rise of personal literacy, a study of language was the way to know God, his universe, the societies of man, and then the human soul itself. In the 19th century, a romantic view that the universe was a language became popular. Everything represented a collection of signs and symbols, which man could eventually interpret and understand if they worked hard enough at it. In the 20th century a rebellion agains the tyranny of print culture and its reduction of all expression to that which is notatable, occurred.
Sound poetry is part of that rebellion.
For sound poets, like most other post cognitive artists of the 20th century, the work becomes the thing it itself, not an interpretation to be abstracted into something else. Work in this century which has been identified with sound poetry, has its beginnings in the onomatopoetic parole in liberta of the Italian Futurists . Though not strictly sound poetry, much of their activities presaged the development of the phonetic poem, and the activities of Russian Futurism and Dada . Language was not truly atomized however, until the introduction of electro-acoustic methods. This development provided both the means and a new way to hear the voice which could then be mimicked by non-electronic means.