The Sound-Sweep

"The Sound-Sweep" is a short story by J.G. Ballard in which the title character, a mute boy vacuuming up stray sounds in a world without music, befriends an opera singer living in an abandoned recording studio. As all previous music has been rendered obsolete thanks to advances in "ultrasonic music", the opera singer is destitute. It was first published in Science Fantasy, Volume 13, Number 39, February 1960 and was reprinted in the collection The Four-Dimensional Nightmare.^[1]

Trevor Horn has said that his lyrics of "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles were inspired by this story of a world without music.^[2] Irish Band "Band on an Island" named their debut album after the short story, and the inlay sleeve features a picture of an old theatre inspired by its opera singing character.

References

↑ "JG Ballard Book Cover Scans: 1960–61". The Terminal Collection. Retrieved 6 January 2009.
↑ Hodgkinson, Will (5 November 2004). "Horn of plenty". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 September 2008.

Works by J. G. Ballard

Novels	The Wind from Nowhere (1961) The Drowned World (1962) The Burning World (1964) The Crystal World (1966) The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) Crash (1973) Concrete Island (1974) High Rise (1975) The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) Hello America (1981) Empire of the Sun (1984) The Day of Creation (1987) Running Wild (1988) The Kindness of Women (1991) Rushing to Paradise (1994) Cocaine Nights (1996) Super-Cannes (2000) Millennium People (2003) Kingdom Come (2006)

Short stories	"Mobile" (1957) "Track 12" (1958) "Zone of Terror" (1960) "The Sound-Sweep" (1960) "The Voices of Time" (1960) "Studio 5, The Stars" (1961) "Deep End" (1961) "Mr F. is Mr F." (1961) "Billennium" (1962) "Minus One" (1963) "The Recognition" (1967) " The Day of Forever" (1967) "The Concentration City" (1967) "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) "Venus Smiles" (1971)

Short story collections	The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) Billennium (1962) Passport to Eternity (1963) The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) The Terminal Beach (1964) The Impossible Man (1966) The Overloaded Man (1967) The Disaster Area (1967) The Day of Forever (1967) Vermilion Sands (1971) Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976) The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977) The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978) The Venus Hunters (1980) Myths of the Near Future (1982) The Voices of Time (1985) Memories of the Space Age (1988) War Fever (1990) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)

Essays, reviews and interviews	A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996) Extreme Metaphors (2012)

Autobiography	Miracles of Life (2008)

Film adaptations and work	When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) Crash! (1971) Empire of the Sun (1987) Crash (1996) The Atrocity Exhibition (2001) Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (2002) High Rise (2015)